


Walk a While With Me

by LadyJanelly



Series: Walk a While [1]
Category: The Losers (2010), The Losers - All Media Types
Genre: Internalized Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-07
Updated: 2012-07-07
Packaged: 2017-11-09 15:43:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/457182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyJanelly/pseuds/LadyJanelly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU—Jake Jensen left the Army before he ever had a chance to be a Loser. Cougar meets him anyway.</p><p>Sometimes what a man needs to have a chance at happiness is losing the battle he’s been fighting his whole life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walk a While With Me

**Author's Note:**

> See the end-notes for spoilery warnings

==========  
Some missions are quicker than others, simpler. The objective had been clean, to get Cougar into position to kill a man from half a mile away. Three days waiting and a single shot and the fate of an eastern European nation changed forever. Cougar didn’t know more than his name and his face. Didn’t know why he had to die, only that orders said to kill him.

From the scene of the engagement (such as it was), it’s back to the air strip, to a chopper, to a plane, to a carrier. Two days later they disembark at Fort Hood, the Texas sun hot and dry. Tac vest slung over one shoulder, rifle over the other, he follows his CO to the barracks they’re using, an empty building of small dorm-style rooms.

The team settles into the communal living area and Cougar claims a table, spreads a cloth and field-strips his rifle, separating and cleaning her down to the last bolt and spring.

None of his team talk to him, put off by his quiet. Sometimes he thinks they see themselves as soldiers and Cougar as a killer, but the thought has long-ago lost its power to hurt him.

He reassembles the rifle, taking his time, checking every part for wear. Rubs his thumb over the “C” carved into the stock by the serial number, the guarantee that no other soldier will dare check this out of the weapons locker, that the clerks won’t let that happen.

The phone on the wall rings and Corporal Jenkins answers. “Yes ma’am, I’ll check,” he says and looks up, covers the mouth-piece and turns to Cougar.

“You here?” he stage-whispers, “It’s your mom, man.”

Cougar shakes his head. Slings his rifle over his shoulder and heads for the door. He should fill out the paperwork to deny her calls. The letters are bad enough. The “What have we done?” and “You are our son and we love you,” hard enough to read much less hear.

He wishes that she would stop. Would just take the money he sends every month and let him be the best son he knows how to be, far from where he can shame or hurt them.

 

===============

Sometimes Cougar thinks he’s been in the Army too long. When his captain announces a week’s leave before the next time he’ll have to crawl through some god-forsaken swamp or lie in wait on top of a burning mountain of rock in the desert, his first thought is “Shit.”

Down-time is never kind to him. Too much time to think, too much time to sin. He thinks he’ll be strong for once, as he trades out his uniform for civvies, as he leaves all but his personal gun behind and takes his bike the couple hours’ drive up to Dallas.

He gets a motel room but barely sleeps there the first night. He’s up with the dawn, leaving his pack of clothes on the bed, his hat on top of it, dog-tags pooled inside. Then he’s out of the room and wandering restless. Searching, though he won’t admit it to himself.

Pink neon catches his eye that second evening, in a neighborhood he’s been to before, the last time he was in town. It’s a club with lots of men and few women hanging around. He’s drawn in, towards the things he can’t allow himself to examine, the wickedness in him that he can’t smother down with duty or faith. He tightens the band on his hair, leaves everything he has except his ID and some cash in the motorcycle’s glove box and heads into the club.

It takes three drinks for him to start to loosen up. To meet the eyes of the other putos as they cruise him where he stands at the bar.

A tall blond faggot stumbles off of the dance floor, flushed with exertion and excitement, brushes against his side as he orders a drink. “Hi,” the blond says, grinning and puppyish. He’s tall and strong and handsome with his odd round glasses and short goatee. Somehow wholesome, even in this place of sin. He looks like everything Cougar has spent his adult life avoiding, and the boy goes back to dancing when Cougar deliberately looks away from him.

“He not your type?” a voice asks from Cougar’s other side, low and dangerous. This, maybe, could be more like it. He looks over and the guy is young and over-muscled, his eyes cold over his make-believe smile. “Can I buy you a drink?”

Cougar nods and pretends he doesn’t notice when the guy drops something into it on its way to Cougar’s hand. His stomach shivers in anticipation as he raises the glass to his lips. This is going to be bad, he thinks, and he feels a flare of hope, that this will finally be the one so bad that his fucked-up desires will learn their lesson. That he’ll be able to stop looking at men, wanting men.

He downs the shot and doesn’t flinch away from the over-warm hand on his waist.

Whatever the guy gave him, it’s quick, layering over the drinks he’s already had. “Want to get out of here? Get some fresh air?” the guy asks and Cougar nods. Feels heavy and dizzy and glad for the arm around him helping him balance.

It’s dark outside, as they slip down an alley and behind another building. “Holy shit, look at this,” a voice says and there are suddenly two other men with them. “You did it,” one of them says and Cougar is shoved over at him. They push him around a bit. Working themselves up in the way cowards do, words like faggot and cock-sucker spilling from their mouths, nothing Cougar hasn’t thought of himself before. Spic and wet-back, words he’s heard too many times before for them to have any bite. He swears back, Spanish rolling off of his tongue.

The first punch is almost a surprise, catching him in the gut and doubling him over. He swings back at them, but the drug makes the world slide around him, and when he does connect it’s without force. He takes three more of their hits before he falls, but one grabs him by the hair and pulls him to his knees.

“Souvenir?” the one from the bar asks and they laugh. Cougar catches a glint of silver from the corner of his eye as the man holding him pops open a knife, and then a sawing, ripping sound as his hair is cut from his head. He falls to the asphalt, harsh on his bare palms.

He’s kicked in the stomach again, and the face, then cold liquid is rushing over him, stinging in the cuts their blows and the knife have made and he flinches away, tries to stand, to crawl. It reeks of alcohol, vodka probably. The empty bottle clubs him in the side of the head and he falls and he can see the third guy there with a lighter in his hand. “No,” Cougar says, and of all the ways he has seen a man die, burning to death is one of the worst.

“Hey!” A voice cuts down the alley and Cougar’s tormentors freeze. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

It’s the blond from the club, pink shirt bright against the griminess of the alley as he runs towards the conflict. Go, Cougar wants to tell him, but can’t make the word.

The biggest of the men is first to swing at the blond, and even Cougar is impressed by the way he dodges the blow, catches the fist as it flies by and with a twist of his hand and a strike to the elbow leaves the man screaming and incapacitated. The second he takes out with a forehead to the bridge of his nose and the third he closes in tight with and strikes him in the ribs with his knee, three, four, five times within seconds, until the man falls down.

After that it’s just the blond driving the men off with half-hearted kicks and insults, making sure none of them tries to circle back to where Cougar is lying in a pool of booze and blood.

Cougar must have blacked out there for a moment, because cool fingers are on his face and he jerks back from the man that’s way too close.

“Hey,” the blond guy says, calm, soothing. “Oh, baby, what have they done to you?” Cougar’s battered brain can’t reconcile the queer words with the calm competence of his touch, strong hands searching out his injuries, firm and steady. Cautiously, the man helps him sit up.

“Thought you were gay,” Cougar mutters, because the guy has to be an undercover cop or something. He means it as a compliment, but the way the guy’s jaw clenches he knows it wasn’t taken that way.

“Yeah, the most bad-ass hairdresser in the state just saved your sorry ass, so you were right about that part.” He strips off his t-shirt and Cougar tries not to appreciate the very naked, muscular chest in front of him. The pink cotton is wadded up and pressed to the back of Cougar’s head, where they cut the ponytail off of him, and fuck that stings! Cougar’s rescuer guides Cougar’s hand to put pressure on it, then sighs and draws back. “Okay, shit. You should really be seen by a doctor. Between the head wound and who-knows-what that guy put in your drink, you sure shouldn’t be alone. You got anywhere to go? Someone I can call?”

The thought of calling his Captain sends a shiver down Cougar’s spine. “No.”

“Okay,” the blond says in an ‘I can deal with this’ voice. “Behind door number one, we’ve got a trip to the ER, and hope those guys don’t beat us there, and if they do, that the police don’t get involved.” That’s almost as bad as calling Cougar’s captain, for his chances of not getting reprimanded at best and kicked out of the military for being a fag at worst.

“Door number two, I drive you back to my place and I watch to make sure you don’t get any worse than you are right now. I was back-up medic for my unit, back in the army, so I’ll at least know when to call an ambulance. I gotta warn you though, I’m a little short on furniture right now, and the house is still in rough shape.”

Cougar cringes under the torrent of words. “I have a hotel room.”

The blond shakes his head. “That’s not working for me, sorry.”

“No hospital,” Cougar says, jaw clenched, and his rescuer nods.

“Okay, let’s get you on your feet. My truck’s over by the club, it’s not far.”

The blond helps him up, holds him steady until Cougar’s got his balance. It hurts. The world spins and pain lances through his ribs and his head, but fuck all that, he’s a soldier. He’s dragged himself half a mile over desert rocks with a broken leg. Getting rolled by some asshole civilians isn’t going to take him down. He grits his teeth and doesn’t cry out and doesn’t puke on himself.

“Jake Jensen,” the man says as he hovers ready to catch Cougar if he should fall.

“Carlos,” he replies, “Cougar to most.”

Jake laughs. “Cougar, I like that, all rarrr,” and the only good thing about Jake’s babble is that they’re at his battered blue 80’s truck a lot sooner than Cougar had expected. Jake helps him up into the seat and then comes around to the driver’s side. He rummages around behind the seat, finds a crumpled t-shirt. Sniff-test comes up negative for wear-ability, judging by the face he makes, but he puts it on anyway.

“Why help me?” Cougar has to ask.

Jake just shrugs and starts the engine. “You look like you’re having a really shitty week,” he replies, which is no kind of answer at all. He grins and gives Cougar a wink, “And I’ve always had a thing for soulful dark eyes.”

“I won’t…” but the words die as Cougar isn’t even sure what it is that he won’t do.

Jake snorts a laugh through his nose. “Hey, you shot me down pretty definitively back there at the bar, I get it and I can take no for an answer. So hey, what do you think those guys are going to say about their injuries? Run over by a biker gang? Mugged by mutants?”

Cougar rests on the drive back to Jake’s place, eyes heavy but never closing.

=================

When Jake had said something about his place being sort of rough, Cougar thought of the apartments he’d been to with his random hookups. He expected maybe some clothes on the floor, a beer can or pizza box here or there.

The house Jake parks in front of is bigger than he expected, but as he follows Jake through the front door, he realizes that size isn’t everything. His first impression is that the place is trashed. Bare cement floor and naked studs where the walls used to be. Stripped down empty, there are pipes hanging out of the wall in what must have been the kitchen.

“It’s a work in progress,” Jake protests as if Cougar had voiced his opinion of the place. Seriously, he’s crashed in third world countries in houses more comfortable than this.

Jake leads him through the home, past a bench of tools and stacks of boxed tile. “Deconstruction is done, should take me about four more months to get it sell-able. I’ll show you my master plan in the morning.”

They duck through a plastic tarp covered doorway and into the space where Jake must sleep, a room not yet demolished, with brown-gold carpet and peeling wall-paper. There is a mattress on the floor in the corner, with a mini-fridge for a nightstand. Along the other side of the room is a table with multiple computer monitors (facing the door, the chair-back to the wall). The light of a bare bulb casts everything into harsh contrast. Jake gestures him through a second door and into the world’s pinkest master bath.

“How’re you feeling?” he asks as Cougar sits down on the closed toilet lid.

“Better,” he answers, because you don’t lie to the medic. “Queasy still. I’ve had worse.”

Jake goes out for a moment and comes back with a serious first-aid kit, all neatly organized supplies. He washes his hands in the sink and then pulls on blue gloves. He checks Cougar’s head wounds first, the blow to the side of his head, the places he was kicked, the knick in his scalp from where they cut his hair off. Flashes a pen-light in his eyes.

“Need help with your shirt?” he asks, and Cougar is sore enough that pride loses and he nods. Jake’s strong hands run over his ribs, noting what makes Cougar tense or wince. “Don’t think they’re broken,” he says at last. “Nothing’s still bleeding, so you don’t need stitches.” He gets the iodine out and cleans all of the broken skin. “You want to shower and then I’ll get the worst of it covered with gauze?”

Cougar nods and Jake helps him to his feet. “You got it on your own?” Cougar nods again and Jake leaves him there. He showers alone, washing the blood and alcohol and a certain amount of shame down the drain. He hears the door open and close but Jake doesn’t say anything and when Cougar comes out of the shower there’s a towel and change of clothes on the toilet. The sweat-pants are a little bit long but the t-shirt fits fine, and it’s good to be clean.

Jake sits at the computer desk when Cougar comes out of the bathroom, the glow of the monitor turning the lenses of his glasses to bright circles covering his eyes. “Hey,” he says as he looks Cougar up and down, appraising the way he moves, the state of his injuries.

He gets Cougar’s scrapes treated and covered. “Get some sleep,” Jake tells him as he gives him a glass of water. “I’ll wake you up in a couple hours, make sure you’re okay.”

Jake’s bed is soft, sheets cool against Cougar’s skin. Cougar sleeps sooner than he expects to. If Jake was going to hurt him, he could have done it much earlier. Sleeping with Jake in the room is like having a trusted teammate on watch, and Cougar is surprised to realize he not only trusts the man, but his competence as well.

Later, Jake’s voice wakes him to the twilight glow of the computer monitors, calling a soft “Cougs, Cougar,” until Cougar’s eyes open and focus on him. A couple Tylenol are pressed into his hand, and another bottle of water from the mini-fridge.

“Gonna sleep a little,” Jake explains as he pulls one of the pillows Cougar wasn’t using and a sheet off of the bed and to the floor. “Got work tomorrow. You need to be anyplace before ten?”

Cougar shakes his head. “Nowhere ‘til Thursday.”

“’Kay,” Jake replies and Jake sits down beside the bed (between the wounded man and the door) and fluffs the pillow.

And this is ridiculous, even given Cougar’s lack of experience with the sleeping habits of maricónes, he can see that Jake’s treating him like some traumatized virgin. “Two will fit,” he says and slides back but Jake shakes his head.

“I don’t deal well sharing a bed,” he says. “Wrong touch, wrong time, it can be really not-good.” He shrugs. “I’m good here, don’t worry about it.” Glasses gone and he looks softer, more open.

Cougar nods, because it’s damn late and he just wants to curl up and sleep it all off. He lies awake on the bed, listening as Jake’s breathing evens out, as he sighs and shifts and finally is still.

===================

Jake’s typing is what wakes Cougar the next time, along with soft, off-key singing and the occasional gleeful cackle. "Oh yeah,” he croons to the computer, “I got you now, mother-fucker.”

He’s wearing headphones and all of his attention is on the computer. Cougar just lays there a bit, watching Jake’s extreme focus on whatever he’s playing. He watches the younger man with his bright smiles and intense energy, handsome face and beautiful body, and the wrongness in him imagines himself stalking over, tipping Jake’s head back, looking into those blue eyes as he ruts against Jake’s muscular chest like an animal until he spills himself over the bright teal of his shirt.

Cougar disgusts himself, and he throws the sheet back so he can get up, get away from even the vague temptation that Jake represents.

He doesn’t mean to startle the other man, but the sudden movement in Jake’s peripheral vision was clearly unexpected. He shoves himself back and away from the desk, one hand grabbing down under the tabletop and coming up with a 9mm as he spins and throws himself on his back on the floor, weapon aimed down between his knees at Cougar’s head.

Cougar only has a split-second’s view down the barrel of the gun before it’s jerked away to point elsewhere and Jake is wheezing out a “Jesus, man, don’t do that.” He shudders all over and sits up, slides the gun back into the holster under the desk (doesn’t put the safety on, didn’t have to take it off in the first place).

“Sorry,” Jake says as he rolls to his feet, not meeting Cougar’s eyes as he rights his chair and goes over to a duffel of clothes at the foot of the bed. He pulls out a change of clothing and heads for the bathroom. Eyes too wide, his breath ragged. “I’m gonna shower, I’ll be right back.”

Cougar hates the dimming of the other man’s light, the tension around his mouth and shoulders. Hates that he did that, even inadvertently.

“Lo siento,” he says when Jake comes out again, but his easy smile is back and he waves off the apology.

“Nah, man, my issues not yours. Sorry I pointed a gun on you on our first date, you know?”

Cougar’s lips quirk and he nods and all is forgiven.

“So what are your plans for today?” Jake asks as he pulls on his sneakers and laces them up. “’Cause if you didn’t have any, I was thinking there’s still time for breakfast, and then I’ve gotta be at the salon at ten, but there’s a washer and dryer there, so if you wanted to do your laundry, I could see what I can do to tidy up the mess they made of your hair.”

Cougar can’t think of a plan that sounds better, so he nods and bags up his stinking clothing and they walk together to Jake’s truck.

Breakfast is at a trendy sort of Brazilian-fusion cafe, but the migas are good and the coffee hot. Jake grabs the check before Cougar can think to and waves off his attempts to pay.

The salon where Jake works is the kind of hideously glossy place that Cougar would never have gone on his own, all sharp chrome and green neon. It smells like chemicals and the ghost of singed hair.

“I have any appointments first thing?” Jake asks the girl at the front desk and she checks the computer for him.

“Not until eleven unless there’s a walk-in.”

Jake thanks her and guides Cougar back past the work stations to the back room, gets his laundry started and then leads him to the wash-sinks. He can feel the eyes of Jake’s co-workers on them, their unasked questions about the bruises on his face and the limp in his walk.

“Trust me,” Jake murmurs at him as he nudges Cougar into the chair, guides him back to the towel-padded edge of the sink, runs his fingers through what’s left of Cougar’s hair. The water is warm and the shampoo is cool. Jake’s touch is firm yet sensual. Intimate in a way that he hasn’t felt since he was a child. “So tense,” Jake scolds, as he catches a rivulet of water before it can get to Cougar’s eye. “I’ve got you.”

He rinses Cougar’s hair. The cut on his scalp is stinging, but not unbearably so, not enough to distract from Jake’s touch as he sits Cougar up again and towels his hair dry, draping the towel around him like a cape. He leads Cougar back over to a chair and Jake’s smiling face beams at him from the license photo beside the mirror. He combs out the tangles and tips Cougar’s head down to examine the damage.

The scissors come out and he begins to cut, no consultation, no explanation. Cougar watches in the mirror as the blades snip and the comb guides. Jake puts away the tools and slicks some pomade into his hands, runs his fingers through Cougar’s hair and tugs it back away from his face.

“This is the best I can do,” he says, and looking in the mirror, Cougar has no complaints. The front is still long, swept back and suitably serious. “It’ll be easier to grow out again, if you don’t have to wait for the bangs to catch up. Couple of months and you should be able to get a pony-tail going again.”

“Gracias,” he murmurs, and means it for everything.

Jake laughs and swats him with the towel and tells him “Okay, get out of my chair now, I’ve got paying customers.”

================

 

Cougar is left at loose ends until two when Jake gets off of work, so he walks. One familiar landmark leads to another and he finds the club he’d been at, dull and grimy in the light of day with its neon turned off and its crowds gone. His bike is still there and he still has his keys, so he drives back to the hotel, changes into his own clothes and gets his hat.

He slides the chain of his dog-tags over his head, feels the beads cool against the back of his neck. He knows who he is with the tags on. He can call himself soldier and know that it is true.

He returns the keys to the hotel office and considers his options. It would be so easy to leave, he thinks. There’s nothing of his left behind except a change of clothes in the salon washer. Nothing of Jake’s to bring back except the sweat pants and t-shirt, and he can leave those on his doorstep if he can find the house.

But then he imagines Jake waiting for a Cougar who never returns. It’s been less than a day, but he thinks Jake is the type who will worry about him, and be hurt that he left without a word, and that’s a shitty thanks for a man who saved his life. He parks the bike and finds a bench to sit on. He watches Jake through the windows of the salon, watches him grin and joke with his clients and co-workers, watches him flirt and tease and feels a little less special, but less pressured too, knowing that Jake can’t help the way he is.

A few minutes after two, Jake comes out of the door, a spring in his step and the bundle of Cougar’s clothes under his arm. “Hey, cowboy,” he grins and looks Cougar up and down and an entirely involuntary smile twitches at Cougar’s lips.

“I want to repay you,” Cougar says, and Jake hesitates.

“Tell me what you’re thinking over lunch?” Jake suggests and they walk to a little Italian place with huge calzone and Jake gets the damn check again.

“I can help with your house,” Cougar offers as they eat. “If you can show me what to do. Maybe some job that is easier with two.”

Jake thinks it over. “Yeah, that would be useful, if you think you’re up to it, man.”

So Cougar ends up following Jake back home, then riding over with him to the hardware store and helping him load sheetrock into the truck and moving it into the house. The gypsum boards are more awkward than heavy, and he can see how it’s easier with two people to move.

The sun is going down by the time they’ve got the supplies in, and most of the house is not light enough to really do much more than stack the sheets in the right rooms.

“I’m thinkin’ this place isn’t so much set up for entertaining. What say we get cleaned up and head down the street to this little bar? Drink some beer, play some pool, relax after our hard day of work?”

Cougar is amiable to that so they shower and change. The bar down the street is sort of a classic rock, no dance-floor, pool-table and dartboard sort of place. A quick glance around shows straight couples and friendly singles. He’s not sure why Jake didn’t choose a gay bar, maybe something as simple as proximity.

They drink some beers and play a few rounds of pool. Jake is not bad, but if there’s one thing Cougar knows it’s the interplay of velocity and angle. A couple of local girls come up, shiny lipstick and flashy nails, and Jake and Cougar coach them through improving their game before yielding the table to them. Jake flirts shamelessly with all the women and a few of the men, but there’s no heat behind it. He watches the room; Cougar sees his eyes check the exits each time he turns around. Jake and Cougar end up slouched into a booth, grinning and half-drunk. Jake talks about his plans for the house, and what he did to the one before that and Cougar listens and nods at all the right places.

They stumble back to Jake’s at the ridiculously early hour of eleven P.M., into the dark house and the air feels heavy, or maybe that’s just Cougar’s own anticipation. Jake gets ibuprofen into them, and a bottle of water each, and they stretch out, Cougar on the bed and Jake beside it.

Cougar can hear Jake sigh in the dark as he settles.

“Jake,” Cougar murmurs into the stillness, and Jake hmms at him in reply. “Will you fuck me?”

It’s dead silent for way too long. “Now?” Jake asks into the dark.

“Si.”

Jake groans in reply, a pained and frustrated noise. “Mother of fuck, you can’t say something like that when a man’s trying to go to sleep.”

“Lo siento,” Cougar says, “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Jesus, Cougs,” he can hear Jake roll over, see the outline of him turn Cougar’s way. “If I even had an idea of what this is, man…” And Jake seems to have no more luck expressing himself than Cougar does. “No, just no. I’m not up for this.”

“Forget that I asked,” Cougar tells him, and there’s no bitterness in his voice.

It’s a long time before either of them sleeps.

==================

He thinks it will be awkward in the morning, but it isn’t. That Jake will treat him different, but he doesn’t.

They get up not long after dawn and drive to a little country breakfast place, then back to the house to start hanging the drywall, working together to get the sheets into place, Cougar holding while Jake drives the screws into the studs. The house seems smaller as they work, but brighter, cleaner, and Cougar is starting to see the potential.

They go to bed that night with no awkward offers of sex, and Cougar thinks that’s probably for the best. He’s not used to being turned down. Women have always been easy for him to seduce (even if he left so many of them disappointed) and he’s never really done much to attract men except for be available.

Jake picks up another four hour shift at the salon on Wednesday and Cougar cracks open the five gallon bucket of joint compound and starts mudding and taping the walls while Jake’s out. He’s not sure how long Jake’s been working on the house, but the change over just a few days is awesome. It feels really good, for someone who has spent so much of his life engaging in destruction, to look at something at the end of the day and say “I made that better.”

Jake drags home a grill, charcoal and some thick steaks, and they eat dinner on the back porch, overlooking the wasteland that is the yard.

“You headin’ back to base today or in the morning?” Jake asks, slipping it in between random facts about hair relaxer and the stats of some MMA fighter he follows. Asks it even though Cougar has never said he was in the army.

“Should probably go tonight,” Cougar answers as they watch the sun start to set, “Traffic,” and that’s all that’s said about it for a while. They stuff the paper plates into a garbage bag and clean the utensils with the garden hose. Cougar goes in and packs his stuff and takes one last look at his work. Wonders what it’ll look like a week and a month and more from now.

Jake meets him at the front door, hands in his pockets. “It’s been nice having you around,” he says, and Cougar isn’t sure what is the right thing to say, or do, so he touches the brim of his hat in silent salute.

“Here.” Jake passes him a folded card. “Call me sometime.” He knocks his shoulder against Cougar’s and turns back to the house without another word.

=====================

Cougar gets back to base before midnight, crashes in an empty barrack and is awake before reveille. He reports to his commanding officer, a dour man by the name of Hitchkins, only to be told “You’re on loan. Losers need a sniper. Report to Lt. Colonel Clay.”

He goes where he’s told. Presents himself to his new CO. The man is tall and tough and all business. He doesn’t hassle Cougar about his hair. Cougar’s first impression is that Clay is probably less likely to get him killed than any other officer he’s worked under, and if he does get Cougar killed, it’ll probably be for a good reason, and that’s all a soldier can ask for.

Roque is the SiC. Harsher around the edges than Clay, but just as strong. Competent and brusque.

Wilkes is their Tech and Comms guy. Weasely fellow with narrow teeth. Egotistical and bitter, and Cougar thinks of them all he’ll be the liability.

Pooch is their wheelman. He’s like fresh air in the desert, light and easy to be around. Devoted to his girlfriend and his dream of the future. Cougar avoids him when he can, unwilling to get caught by another man’s hopes, to be hurt if they crash and burn.

They ship out for Nicaragua the next day, targeting drug and gun runners destabilizing what Uncle Sam would rather stay quiet.

Their first contact with the enemy, Cougar picks off eleven targets and feels nothing. When it’s over, he takes the card Jake gave him and tears it into tiny pieces, lets them drift from his fingers into the wind. Whatever Jake’s lived through in the army, he doesn’t deserve the shit of having someone like Cougar in his life.

When they get back to the US, Clay plays poker with Hitchkins, the title of his Mustang against Cougar’s transfer papers, and when the hand is done, Cougar is a Loser permanent. Roque nods, Pooch claps him on the back and Wilkes spits between his teeth.

The next job sees them shipping out less than a day later. “Long flight, sleep on the plane,” Clay tells them, but Cougar can see he’s not exactly thrilled by the quick turn-around. They’re dropped off in the back-ass of some third-world African country, with operations to disrupt, bad guys to capture.

It all goes pear-shaped a week in. Their exit chopper takes a rocket coming to pick them up and Wilkes steps on an IED as they run for safer ground. No long-distance comms, no allies, no ticket home. They end up hiking two hundred miles to a country that at least pretends to be friendlier to the Americans. Roque and Pooch are able to blend in enough to get close to the embassy, and they finally, finally get pulled out.

Cougar loses twenty pounds and more over the months they’re on the run, his body burning through every ounce of fat and on into the lean muscle mass. He comes out with three brothers and a team that’s been tested in fire and blood, and that counts for a hell of a lot.

The whole time he’s fighting and marching and trying not to die, he thinks he’s running away from death, but after they’re lifted out, he still feels restless, yearning. A week in the infirmary and then they get three weeks of medical leave on their own recognizance to get their health back. Pooch goes to stay with his grandmother. Clay and Roque stay on base. Cougar catches a transport to Hood, and from there gets one of the motor pool guys to drive him into Dallas. He sleeps on the plane and only speaks to his driver to give him directions to a house he hasn’t been to for months.

He passes it twice before he’s sure which one it is, all the houses on the street built to similar plans, a similar look. The yard is different than Cougar remembers it, crisp hedges and flowering borders. “Here,” he says, and the driver stops, coming around to get Cougar’s sack from the trunk for him.

Standing is a chore; he feels weak and tired. It was so much easier to make himself move when stopping meant dying. When falling meant one of the others would stop and carry him and they’d both die.

The driver looks to wait for Cougar to get to the door before he leaves but Cougar waves him off. If he’s wrong, if Jake isn’t here anymore, or if it’s the wrong house, or if Cougar just isn’t welcome, well, he’ll figure something out then.

He rings the doorbell when he gets to it. Hears it echo through the house. There’s nothing but silence after, no footsteps, no hand on the door. It doesn’t mean too much. It’s still early in the afternoon, and Jake could be at work, or out at a bar. It doesn’t mean he’s already sold the house, that some suburban family is going to come home to find Cougar on their front step.

He sets his pack behind him and pulls his hat down over his eyes and hopes the neighbors don’t call the cops.

===========

 

Cars pass on the small road in front of (what he hopes is) Jake’s house, and Cougar tunes them out as background noise. Then one stops nearby, idling, and Cougar opens his eyes. Jake leaves the beige sedan he drove up in, and Cougar can see the faces of a woman and child still in the vehicle. Jake’s wearing a white button down shirt and khaki pants, polished shoes and his hair is neat and sharp. He has his “who the fuck is on my lawn” face on, at odds with the yuppie costume he’s wearing. His body is loose and ready for a fight and Cougar has a moment of really hoping it doesn’t come to Jake physically kicking him out.

He tips his hat back instead, and smiles, because even if Jake’s pissed at him, it’s damn good to see him. The restlessness that’s plagued him since they got back to the States is suddenly eased, and no matter what comes next, at least he made it home.

The change in Jake as Cougar shows his face is instantaneous. He drops the wary stalking and rushes those last few steps as Cougar manages to get himself to his feet. He freezes, like he’s not sure where he can touch and then he pulls Cougar into a crushing hug. 

“What the hell, man?” he asks against Cougar’s temple, then pulls back to look at him again. “You look like shit, you know that? You never called, dick-head.” His hands are warm on Cougar’s shoulders, even with the Texas sun shining down on them. 

Cougar opens his mouth to tell Jake that where he’s been is classified, but Jake’s already shaking his head and he leaves the words unspoken. “You’re back,” he tells Cougar, “You’re back, that’s enough.”

The car doors close behind Jake and Cougar looks over his shoulder to see the woman and a little girl walking up the path. He has a sick moment where he wonders if Jake has managed to make himself normal, build a family. They’re all dressed up and Cougar realizes it’s Sunday, Madre de Dios, they were probably at church and he’s brought himself into their lives. If he fucks this up for Jake…

“Hey,” Jake says and shakes him a little by his shoulders. “Come on, let’s get you inside, how long have you been sitting out here waiting for us?” He steps around Cougar and unlocks the door, leading the way in. Cougar has to pause a second on the threshold, to appreciate what Jake’s done with the place, the soft warm colors, mossy greens and honey golds. Crown molding and granite counter-tops. The cool air washes over him and Jake catches him by his elbow like he was going to faint or something, leads him through to the kitchen table. There is a crock pot on the counter and the smell of cooking roast fills the room and makes Cougar’s stomach rumble. 

The woman follows, the little girl hiding half behind her skirts.

“Cougar, this is my sister, Teresa, her daughter Sophie. Guys, this is my friend, Cougar.”

The woman, Teresa, she smiles at that. “Cougar, nice to finally meet you,” she says and offers her hand. 

“Carlos,” he says in return, “Por favor,” because he’s Cougar to people that he wants to respect him, but Carlos to people he wants to like him, and sisters and nieces definitely fall into that category, even if neither of them looks a thing like Jake. He tries to stand up to greet her properly; his mama taught him some manners after all, but Jake’s hand on his shoulder is distraction and discouragement and then the moment’s gone.

Jake bustles around, getting Cougar a big glass of orange juice, waters for himself and his family. "Sophie, set the table?” he asks and pulls down a stack of bowls for her. “Lunch will be up in a few minutes,” he tells Cougar. “Anything special you need?” 

He shakes his head, nearly overwhelmed by the domestic chaos of it all, the little girl plinking down silverware in front of him, Teresa dishing out steaming bowls of beef and vegetables, Jake toasting slices of some heavenly-scented bread. The house is like something out of a magazine, everything so sharp-edged and shiny. 

He won’t flinch, won’t make them think they’ve done something wrong, but he should not have come here, should have left things as they were between him and Jake, let it go.

Everyone finally sits at the table. They do a little heads-bowed moment of silence and then everyone’s eating. Teresa asks Sophie questions about Sunday school and Jake watches Cougar like he thinks he’ll disappear if he takes his eyes off of him. He’s not sure if it’s just him or if the room is too tense, if the child is too quiet. He feels like he’s intruding, making people uncomfortable.

“Hey,” Jake says as Cougar puts his fork down, stomach over-full even with as little as he ate, “You wanna go see the new house I bought?” It sounds an awful lot like an offer to go somewhere quieter, somewhere simpler, and Cougar nods.

“Thank you for the meal,” he tells Teresa. Jake stands and puts his lunch into a plastic dish to take with them and Cougar is sorry to notice that he’d barely eaten. 

He walks Cougar out through the side door where his truck’s in the garage. “You got a hotel yet?” 

Cougar shakes his head.

“So this new house, it’s in better shape than the last, if you wanna crash. There’s a spare bed here that I can bring with us so neither of us will have to take the floor.”

He should say no. He should ask why the hell Jake would do so much for him when he’s given back so little.

The thought of being alone in a hotel room is almost painful and a man less practiced at utter stillness might have shuddered. 

“I would be in your debt,” he says, his words softly formal. 

Jake takes his rucksack and tucks it into the cab of the truck behind the seats. “Go ahead, get in. I’m gonna go get the mattress, back in a sec.”

Cougar settles into the truck’s bench seat, stretches his legs out and pulls his hat low over his face. Breathes in the smell of Jake and tries to find some crack in this perfect picture. Some flaw that keeps this from all being too good to be true, too good for a man like him.

 

=====================..

This house is in better shape than the other had been when Cougar first visited, except for the pervasive ammonia smell of animal piss, even with the flooring pulled up to bare cement. Cat, dog, maybe ferret too. All the walls still have their drywall on, although bright red spray-paint spells out “FUCK YOU” on every surface.

Jake catches him staring and laughs. “It was a foreclosure. When you really mean it, say it with Krylon.”

Jake leads him through to his ‘base camp.’ This time it looks like he started there, finished the room and the bathroom before moving on to work on the rest of the house. There’s a sheet of plastic hanging over the doorway and a window unit air-conditioner keeps it cool without circulating the stench of the rest of the house here. The bed is different, a full instead of a queen, but the computer table looks almost exactly the same.

Jake leans Cougar’s sack at the foot of the bed. Cougar sits down on the edge of the mattress and Jake joins him there. “It’s not much, but mi casa and all that. How long are you in town for?”

“Three weeks medical,” Cougar answers.

“Doctor’s orders?” Jake asks and holds out his hand. Cougar pulls the creased instruction sheets out of his pocket and passes them over.

Jake skims through it all in a few seconds. 

“So we’re looking at one week to get some meat on your bones, one to bring your cardio up and a third to work on speed, agility, reflexes, all that?”

Cougar nods that yes, that’s the gist of it. 

“I’ll get a microwave in tomorrow, so we can have more small meals for you here. Next week we can do early morning road work, or I’ll get you a gym membership, whichever works best. Not sure if I’ll be challenge enough, but we can spar in the back yard, or there’s a couple MMA schools around that have open fight-nights we could hit.”

“That would be good,” Cougar murmurs, a little amazed to have all this planned and taken care of for him. “I’ll help with the house again.” 

Jake nods and passes the instructions back. “Awesome. Whenever you’re up to it. I’ve got work at the salon from ten to two, three times a week, and I’m watching Sophie from three to six on school days. I’m cutting your hair tomorrow. Non-negotiable.”

Cougar snorts but isn’t really arguing.

Jake grins. “Come on, I have to. Being seen with this mess would be bad for my reputation.”

“Bien,” Cougar agrees, and Jake goes serious again.

“How’re you sleeping? Since you got back?” Cougar’s frown is answer enough to that. 

“What do you need?” Jake asks in that too-earnest way of his. Like if Cougar said he needed silk sheets and a gold-plated headboard he’d make it happen. “I can set up another room if you need the space, or I can put the other bed in here…”

“In here,” Cougar says, too damn quick for his pride to take, and Jake nods. 

“You look wiped, man. You want to crash out for a while? Am I gonna keep you up if I work on the house some?” 

“It’s fine,” Cougar tells him. “Some noise, it’s fine.” Anything is better than the echoing beeps and clangs of the infirmary.

Jake smiles at him, warm and real. “Get some sleep then.” He leaves the room to Cougar and goes to do some work. Cougar falls asleep to the tinny echo of classic rock coming through the walls; the soft thumping and scraping of whatever Jake’s working on is more soothing than it should be.

==================

 

Cougar wakes as the sky is turning orange, crawls out of bed and shakes himself off. Hungry again, so he goes to find Jake. He follows his ears and finds him working in the living room, working by the light of a leaning lamp as he spackles texture on the wall over the graffiti. 

“Cougs,” Jake smiles as he sees him, “Hey, just thinking about dinner. You up for it?” 

They get ready and go out. Jake takes him to a restaurant that serves coastal-Mexican cuisine, delicate fish and lime, and Cougar eats more than he had expected to. 

Jake drinks a beer with dinner and Cougar drinks water, afraid of embarrassing himself by getting drunk on so little. Jake chooses the wrong time to hit the head and Cougar gets to throw his card on the bill for the first time since they’ve met. Small victories.

After, they go back to Jake’s and Jake brings the second mattress in out of the truck, lays it down a few feet away from Cougar’s spot and sets it up. Close enough to hear each other breathe, far enough that there’s no chance of accidentally touching in the night. Later still, they strip down to boxers and t-shirts and Jake turns out the light and they lie in the dark. 

For a long time, Cougar waits for sleep to come. Breathes deep and slow. Calms his heart and feels his body become heavy. He doesn’t sleep though. He can feel himself trying to listen over the hum of the AC, the whoosh of cars on the street outside. Listen for enemies or danger.

“Cougar,” Jake whispers in the dark, “You still awake?”

“Si.”

“What do you need?”

And hell if he knows. He’s still trying to come up with something that’ll help when Jake sighs. He can see the silhouette of the other man shift around on the bed, pull the 9mm out from between the mattress and box springs. 

“Move over,” Jake says and Cougar does. Jake settles down on the edge of the bed, his back to the wall where the headboard should be. Gun in his lap. Not touching Cougar, but close. Standing watch even though all the danger is in Cougar’s head. 

“Cougar?” Jake whispers again and Cougar makes just enough of a movement to show that he’s still awake. “Your team have your back through whatever the fuck this was?”

“Si.”

“You trust them?”

“With my life.”

“With who you are?” Jake asks, and even though Cougar doesn’t think about himself that way, he knows what Jake means.

“No.”

“Good,” Jake says and sighs with relief. 

It’s too much to puzzle out and Cougar is too tired to bother. Jake keeps watch, and Cougar sleeps.

==================

Jake takes him in to work the next morning, and Cougar may have some reservations about letting a sleep-deprived man near his head with scissors, but he mans up and keeps his mouth shut about it, trusting that Jake wouldn’t cut his hair if he didn’t feel capable. 

Maybe, just maybe, the temptation of Jake washing his hair again, touching him so gently, is part of what makes him risk it, but damn, it’s worth it, when he’s got his head tipped back and Jake’s fingers massaging over his scalp, grumbling over his split ends and working the conditioning treatment into his hair. If Clay and Roque and Pooch could see him now, there would be no end to the shit they’d give him over it, but it would be worth it still.

Jake finishes squeezing Cougar’s hair out, wraps his head in a towel and helps him to stand. He gets Cougar draped and in the chair and starts in with the comb, picking out the overnight tangles and testing the lay of his part. His hands move quick, precise, competent, and even when Jake’s cutting hair, Cougar can see the soldier he must have been and isn’t anymore.

“The army to…this?” Cougar asks, and Jake’s eyes meet his in the mirror, and he smiles. 

Jake’s quiet a moment and Cougar lets it ride. 

“So, I was in the Army, and then I wasn’t anymore. Long story. I’ll tell you sometime, but not here, not in my happy place.” He shakes off whatever dark thought accompanies his departure from the military and goes back to fussing with Cougar’s hair, not cutting it yet, just combing it this way and that, seeing how it falls when he drops it. He finally smiles a little and gets his scissors.

“So I was out, and I got my GI Bill money, for school or vocational training or whatever. It wasn’t much, just a couple hundred dollars, and I said to myself ‘Self? What would piss these guys off the most if they knew?’ And I used their money to enroll in beauty school.” That’s so funny and so very Jake that Cougar can’t help but smirk at the idea of it.

He makes a pass over Cougar’s hair, snipping the very end off of each and every hair, section by section. He tests the fall again, pulls the sides down along Cougar’s jaw to compare the symmetry, goes back and cuts some more.

“I’m glad I did,” he says as he pulls the front up, checking to see how the back is growing in, shaping and molding the shorter hairs. “I would have become a hermit, seriously. And I like it. Working with people, making them pretty.” He meets Cougar’s eye in the mirror and honest-to-god winks at him. 

He puts away the scissors and shifts the comb to the other hand. Something about the situation is stirring Cougar’s attention. The combination of Jake’s hands and Jake’s voice. The comb against his scalp as Jake draws the hair back from Cougar’s face, ties it back in a small samurai knot at the back of his head. It’s nothing like anything he’s found erotic before, but he does now. Feels heat rising in his cheeks and a tightening in his jeans as his abused body tries to get it up. 

“What do you think?” Jake asks and it takes a second for Cougar to get that he means the haircut.

“Gracias,” Cougar says because he has no idea what the criterion for ‘good’ is , or how to judge such a thing. Hair is hair and he’s not sure what the point of the cut was besides making Jake happy. He looks at himself in the mirror, too-thin and less than tough-looking.

Jake grins and drops his hat onto his head.

“Sometime before you leave, you’re taking me dancing, cowboy,” Jake tells him and Cougar smiles and nods. It’s the least he can do.

=======================

Cougar takes Jake’s truck back to the house, stopping by a taquoria truck on the way. Small meals often they say, and the taste of home goes down easier than the weight gain shake mix the doctor gave him. He sits on the curb by the trailer’s propane tank while he eats, listening to the rapid flow of Spanish around him, relaxing as he gets to speak and think in the same language. A girl comes up, too young and her skirt too short. He’s not sure if she’s a hooker or just lonely, but he sends her on her way and thinks about leaving. 

A gringo in a white SUV pulls up beside him and asks if he’s looking for work. Offers a hundred dollars a day and lunch. It’s been a long time since Cougar was in a place like this, sixteen and standing with his papi and hoping to be chosen to paint a house or lay a roof. He’s not that boy anymore; he has a rifle and rank but not much else to show for fifteen years of his life. He shakes his head and a young man comes over and talks for a minute with the man before climbing in his truck. Cougar stands and stretches. He feels old as he walks back to Jake’s truck, makes the short drive back to his house.

He naps for a while, Jake’s pistol under his hand. He’ll have to ask Jake if there’s a gun range nearby, but he’s at least a week out from being fit enough to actually fire a weapon. Using his rifles will have to wait until he’s back on base, but he has no worries that a few hours practice will knock the rust off of his skills.

He goes out again and picks Jake up at work at two, and then Jake drives to a school nearby and they wait with all the mini-vans for a little girl in a red dress to run up. Cougar likes seeing what the sight of his niece does for Jake. The way his face lights up as he opens the door and steps out to sweep her into a big hug before sliding her across the truck’s bench seat. She seems to notice the other passenger then, eyes going wide and her little body tensing up and Jake’s voice is gentle when he says “Hey, you remember Cougar. He’s my friend; he’s not scary at all.” 

Jake slides in behind the wheel, makes sure everyone is buckled in, and they head off to a local park. The three of them sit in the shade of a live oak tree while Jake and Sophie work through her homework for the day. Cougar leans back with his elbows on the table and watches the dog-walkers and joggers, homeless guys and nannies with their charges. His eyes are heavy and the breeze feels good. Jake’s voice is soft and steady, encouraging and guiding but not giving her the answers. The girl is quieter than Cougar remembers children being, back when he used to visit his family instead of just sending them his checks. 

This must be what normal feels like, Cougar thinks to himself. He tries to imagine just being Carlos, tries to imagine who he would be if he had never fled to the military with the hope it could keep him from being queer.

After homework is done, Sophie runs off to play on the slide. Jake turns around on the bench to join Cougar sitting backwards to watch her. “No offense,” he says with a grin, and Cougar raises an eyebrow at him. “For saying you weren’t scary. Didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

Cougar snorts and relaxes into the heat of the concrete table at his back. They’ve got an hour left before Teresa gets off of work, and it feels good just to be close to Jake, to be still. He’s surprised when he feels Jake tense beside him, sees him lean forward and frown and stare. There’s a man by the playground, sitting alone at a bench in between the swings and the sand pit. Not messing with anyone, just watching. “Want to take a walk?” Jake asks and whatever play he’s making here, Cougar is in.

They get up and walk. Sophie is still climbing on the jungle-gym and Cougar hopes she isn’t about to see something that negates Jake’s assurance that Cougar’s a good man.

Jake sits down on the bench beside their target, a guy in business slacks, polo shirt, shined shoes. Cougar takes the other side, just a hair too far inside the man’s personal bubble.

“This look like Macy’s?” Jake asks, a low tone in his voice that Cougar hasn’t heard since the night they met. 

“What?” the guy asks, color rising up his neck. He looks at Cougar and Cougar glares back at him. 

“No window-shopping,” Jake growls. “My niece plays here. I see you here again and I’m breaking your face, you got it?”

The guy nods and scrambles away and Jake stands up to watch him all the way to the parking lot. 

“Well, that was fun,” Jake says like it wasn’t at all.

“Who was he?” Cougar asks.

“Registered sex offender,” Jake answers. He stands up and leads the way back to their table. “I keep an eye out on the websites. He’s a little far from home, but I knew him.” He rolls his neck and Cougar winces at the hideous pops and cracks. “Anyway. Teresa made lasagna last night. We can eat there or get it to go.”

It isn’t the change of topic that Cougar would have chosen, but he’ll take it. “I make them nervous,” he says, even though that’s not exactly what Jake asked. He thinks of Teresa, her smiles just a little too tight, Sophia quiet and shy. 

“It’s not you.” Jake shakes his head. “There was trouble. With her ex. I had to go up to New England and get them, make sure he understood that it was over when she said it was over. They’d had a rough couple of months before that. They’re just not used to having a guy that isn’t me around the house again. They’ll be okay.” 

Cougar’s lips quirk into a smile. “We‘ll eat there then. She has plates.”

Jake laughs and smacks his arm. “Ouch! Is that how you repay my hospitality?”

They watch Sophie play for a while and then head back to the truck. They eat dinner with the family, and it’s less tense than the last time, so Jake must be right about the cause. 

As he’s closing his eyes to sleep that night, Cougar wonders if this is how it always is, life away from the army. 

If it wasn’t for Jake sitting awake with the pistol in his hand, Cougar could almost pretend it had always been his life.

=================

 

“Just until I sleep,” Cougar had told Jake the night before. “You must rest also.” 

So he’s a little surprised to wake up to the patter of Jake’s fingers on the keyboard, the light outside blue and hazy with early morning fog.

“What are you doing?” he grumbles. Jake’s face is lit by the computer screens. He doesn’t look like he’s been to bed at all. The 9mm sits on the edge of the desk.

“Want to see something cool?” Jake asks, and Cougar hopes to god it isn’t porn as he stands up and comes over to stand behind Jake’s chair. Not that he has anything against porn, it would just make things awkward between them.

Jake glances back and grins. “Okay so here,” he clicks the mouse and a picture of the guy from the park comes up on the left-most monitor. “This is our friend Ralph. Say hi, Ralph! From the sex offender’s registry, I’ve got name and address. Here is the driver’s license office. I added a back door to their system like a year ago that they haven’t found yet. With that, I can get here, to a background check. Current employer, social security number.”

Cougar thinks he’s following it all. Not how Jake can do this, just that he has.

“Why?” he asks and Jake’s lip curls in something that is not a smile. 

“Fucking pervert, coming around the park where I bring my niece? People like that don’t deserve nice things.” He presses some keys and one of the screens goes crazy, forms popping up, filling themselves and disappearing again. “This sweet little program will fill out credit card applications for him. How many, you ask? All of them. Mailing addresses randomized over Ssouth Dallas to make sure they get used. I mean, not that he’ll be approved for all of them, but some of these banks have huge annual fees, they’ll give a card to anyone. Just the applications will tank his credit rating by about a hundred points. Take months of work for him to sort it out, if he ever does.”

Cougar sighs and puts his hands on Jake’s shoulders, feels Jake’s muscles tight under his palms. Not that he can’t understand the sentiment, he just hates to see Jake this stressed and tense. He skims the information on this Ralph. His victim was a twelve year old boy. Cougar is no expert on such things, but he seems little danger to a young girl.

“I’ll keep an eye on this one,” Jake says. “He’s on my fuck-with list to visit again.” He looks back at Cougar, blue eyes red-rimmed by lack of sleep. “Those guys who fucked with you last time. My old unit. Couple others. They are never going to buy a house or get a prime interest rate on a car. Never get a job that needs a security clearance or clean credit.”

“Jake,” Cougar sighs, because he hates the idea of him getting this upset over what happened in that alley. He wonders if tracking them down was what he was doing the time Cougar startled him and Jake pulled a gun on him. “Come lay down. I’ll take watch this time.” 

Jake’s head sags between his shoulders, stretching out his back. The strong line of his neck is right there and Cougar scrapes his blunt nails over the base of his scalp, where the blond hairs are so short. He’s never touched another man this way. Intimate and gentle.

“Fuck,” Jake groans and it doesn’t sound sexual at all. Just tired beyond words. He clicks a few keys and shuts down some programs. Cougar helps him to his feet and over to bed. By his calculations Jake’s at least forty hours up, Sunday morning to Tuesday’s dawn; knowing Jake’s erratic sleep, it may be more.

Jake flops down on the bed, still in boxers and t-shirt and Cougar tosses a sheet over his back. He gets the firearm off of the computer desk, flicks on the safety and then he sits on the other bed, knowing Jake doesn’t want to be touched in his sleep. He watches, listens, but Jake’s breathing doesn’t even out, his shoulders don’t relax. All worked up from fighting people that aren’t even in the room.

“Cougs,” he falters. “I can’t…”

“What do you need?” Cougar asks, giving to Jake what Jake has given to him.

“I’m sorry,” Jake says, “I need you to leave. I…it’s not you. They…I was asleep. I thought I was safe. I thought they needed my skills even if they didn’t like me all that much.”

Cougar has never wanted to touch a man so much in his life, but Jake looks like he might break if he did. He’s putting up a brave front, stretched out on his side, one hand resting on his stomach. His eyes are closed too tight though, his shoulders too tense. 

“Your unit?” Cougar whispers into the pre-dawn light.

Jake nods. His voice is a whisper. “There was a guy. In my unit. I thought he was into me. Thought he was flirting back. I woke up with them pulling a bag over my head.” Jake’s eyes open and he stares at the far wall. “Beat the shit out of me. They…” he pauses so long that Cougar thinks he’s just going to leave the story there. “They hurt me real bad, Cougs. They really did. I lost two teeth. They kicked me so hard they ruptured one of my testicles. And. They tore me up. Pushed a beer bottle...” Cougar breathes slow and steady. Pulse rate dropping for the kill-shot. There must be records of this, or rumors, no matter if a few years have passed since, but there is no way for him to ask anyone but Jake without exposing himself to the risk of losing everything. 

He understands Jake’s fuck-with list a little more because he now has one of his own, he just doesn’t have the names yet.

“It was never gonna change. They would have killed me. Code Red or friendly fire. I fucking crawled halfway to the infirmary before anybody even helped me.” The naked shame in Jake’s voice makes Cougar’s chest tight, his fingers grip the stock of the gun. 

“They gave me Other than Honorable and I took it.”

“Jake,” Cougar whispers. “Jake, there was nothing to be gained by staying.”

Jake’s breath hitches and Cougar tucks the gun between the mattress and the wall and goes to him. Takes a slow breath because if Jake comes up fighting, he’s in no shape to defend himself. He puts a hand on Jake’s shoulder and he’s cold, trembling, jaw clenched tight as he struggles against the tears and the memories. 

“Don’t…don’t go,” Jake says, words forced through closed teeth. Shamed by his need as much as by his past. He rolls over and crawls closer as Cougar sits down, wraps an arm tight around Cougar’s hips and presses his face in against Cougar’s bare thigh. He doesn’t cry and he doesn’t sleep, not for a long time. Others must know, but Cougar wonders if he’s the first who has heard the story from Jake’s lips.

Cougar closes his eyes and slides his fingers through Jake’s short hair and mourns his friend’s pain, mourns the soldier he could have been. He wishes he could say that they were one bad group but he doesn’t know. He couldn’t imagine Clay and Roque and Pooch turning on him, but he doesn’t know that for sure. 

“Mi querido,” he soothes, his voice strange around a tone he never has a use for. “Sleep. I will guard you, I swear. I like you. I will not hurt you.”

“Was tough as any of them, Cougs,” Jake mumbles, “God-damn special forces and everything an’ they fucked me.” 

“Hush,” Cougar tells him. “Sleep,” and Jake does.

 

===========

Cougar sits for hours with Jake wrapped around him. Tensing and flexing individual muscle groups without moving around. Motionless even when the line of his back begins to cramp. 

Jake sleeps like shit, but at least he sleeps. He’ll half-wake, going suddenly tense, and Cougar will whisper him back down into sleeping again. Around nine, Cougar rouses him enough to ask “You need to call work?” because if there’s one thing the military teaches a man it’s to never be AWOL. Jake shakes his head and rolls away from Cougar’s side. 

“No,” he mumbles. “Nothin’ until two. Sophie.” Cougar waits but Jake doesn’t fall asleep again. Not with Cougar awake and watching.

“Can I use the truck?” Cougar asks and Jake waves over his shoulder to the computer desk where the keys are. 

Cougar stands, walks off the pins and needles down his legs. “I’ll be back,” he says, and then “Don’t shoot me.”

Jake snorts and pulls a pillow over his head.

Cougar pulls on his clothes and goes out to the truck. The Texas sun is cruelly bright, cutting low over the skyline, glaring off of the truck’s hood. He drives around a while and stops for a drive-through breakfast, picks up enough for two. He thinks about parking here and sitting for a while in the lot, but a cop pulls through slow and he figures risking trouble is a poor way to start the day. He ends up circling the block and then sitting in Jake’s driveway for an hour or so, radio tuned to a Tejano station. He drinks his coffee and eats his food and watches a pair of squirrels play tag around the tree in Jake’s back yard.

He’s there until the back door opens and Jake stumbles out in his boxers, rubbing his face and squinting at the world through his glasses. Cougar shuts off the truck and climbs down, hands Jake his breakfast and the paper cup of cold coffee.

Jake stumbles back into the house to the microwave to heat up his gift, stands there half-naked until he’s drank it all. He wanders the house a little after that, looking over their accomplishments, planning the next day’s work.

“So. Last night,” Jake says after he’s caffeinated, the two of them surveying the sad state of the house’s living room. “Sorry about that. Won’t happen again.” He doesn’t meet Cougar’s eyes and Cougar isn’t sure if he should push it or let it slide. Isn’t sure what he should say even if he was brave enough to try to use words to help.

“What are we working on today?” he asks instead and Jake looks around the room.

“I think I’m done with this stink,” Jake announces. “Floor paint, lunch, Sophie. In that order.”

They drive to a big-box home improvement store. Jake’s plan of getting the floor painted in the morning is derailed by all the shiny tools, “Cougar, look, it’s modular!” The sales clerk in power tools gives them a look, Jake so damn bouncy and Cougar hiding half his face under the brim of his hat. Cougar feels like they’re on display. That assumptions are being made. He steps away to look at a socket set and heat rises on his cheeks. He isn’t sure if it’s shame that the man thought they were together, or shame that he was so uncomfortable at the thought that he would turn from Jake. 

From power tools they wander through flooring, picking up some samples of ceramic tile that Jake wants to try in the bathrooms, paint for the floors. Cougar watches, to see if Jake noticed the small betrayal, if Jake is quieter or tense, but he can see no sign.

By the time they get back in the truck, Cougar’s stomach is rumbling and he’s hungry for the first time in weeks, his appetite suddenly and viciously awake. “Lunch?” he suggests and Jake nods. They take a turn and Cougar recognizes the area. Near Jake’s work, near the club they first met at. It feels strange to go to such a neighborhood for food. He can understand a place for the gays to meet or to have other gay men cut their hair. He doesn’t really understand why there would be special places for them to eat together.

The restaurant Jake takes him to is like a gay parody of a nineteen fifties diner, all black and white tile, but with the bright blare-and-thump music that Cougar has so often been fucked to in the back of some club. He looks around and sees only one mixed-sex pair sitting at a table; all the rest are men together or women together. The tip jar on the counter says “We shake our buns for you.” 

The smell of the grill is making his stomach churn with hunger, but his discomfort with the atmosphere of the place makes him too wary to relax. When it’s his turn to order he asks for a burger and Coke, and is not surprised when Jake adds fried mushrooms and a slice of the cake-of-the-day to it. 

“Hey,” Jake says and bumps his foot under the table as they wait for their food. “You okay?”

“Si,” Cougar answers, and when Jake still looks curious and concerned, he adds “I have never been to such a place.”

“A burger joint?” 

“A gay burger joint.” 

Jake looks thoughtful and their food arrives then, brought by a cheerful waiter in a white apron and paper hat who calls Cougar “Sugar” and winks at them both.

The conversation falters as they eat, Jake pausing to take bites of his burger in the middle of his story about how this place used to be tucked into the tiny storefront there across the street, best burgers in Dallas for a decade running now. For all the odd ambiance, the food is damn good and the burger gone before Cougar realizes, his fries and mushrooms soon after. Jake dumps some more from his own plate and Cougar eats through those too. 

“Jake!” a voice cries from over by the door, high-pitched and over-loud and Cougar half-startles from his chair before he realizes the shriek is joy and not murderous intent. His eyes go wide as the person (his mind cannot quite identify it as ‘man’) flounces over to Jake. The creature is ridiculous, all too-tight clothes and flopping wrist, make-up on his face and lips pursed. 

“I went to get my hair done and you weren’t there, you monster,” the mayate mock-complains at Jake, thwapping him on the shoulder with a limp hand. 

Jake doesn’t seem to notice what a freak he’s talking to. He meets the man’s eyes like he would Cougar’s or the clerk at the hardware store. “Sorry Armando, I’ve got the day off. I’ll be there tomorrow until two if you wanna come by then.”

The man, Armando, sighs dramatically and turns a curious eye over at Cougar, and Cougar doesn’t know if it’s pity or revulsion he’s feeling. 

Jake smiles still, “Armando, my friend Cougar. Cougar, Armando.”

Armando’s eyebrows flick up and he haughtily offers his hand to Cougar, like he expects Cougar to kiss his ring or something and no. It’s more than he can take and he stands, chair scraping on the floor as he does. He pushes past the man, who cries out like he was struck instead of jostled. He needs air, sunlight.

Behind him he hears Armando’s sharp “Oh my god, rude much?” pierce the air and Jake’s low “Hey. Don’t,” in warning, but he isn’t sure if Jake’s talking to Cougar or the other.

He hits the sidewalk and it’s quieter out here, a few people going from their cars to the shops, but room to breathe. There is a cement bench, empty, in front of Jake’s truck and he stops there, hands gripping the back of it as he stands there, head bowed as he tries to get himself under control.

“Cougar?” Jake asks from behind him. He can’t be sure without looking, but he doesn’t think Jake is angry with him. Confused, maybe disappointed. He has no idea how long the other man has been there. He nods that he hears, waits to see what Jake will do.

“You okay?”

“No.”

“Okay. I can work with that. Let’s get out of here, huh?” He opens up the truck and Cougar climbs into the passenger seat, hiding behind his hat.

Jake is quiet, and that is odd enough that Cougar feels guilty for it. Knows he’s fucked up but not sure how to fix it. He should just go, he thinks. Find a hotel and hole up until he can go back to Bragg without the guys wondering what happened to bring him back early.

Jake drives aimlessly for a while and finally pulls the truck to a stop in the parking lot of a little park.

“You are gay, right?” he asks out of the quiet, and the muscles along Cougar’s jaw jump with tension. The words, to confirm or deny, they catch in his throat and he can’t talk. 

“I know some straight guys go to the bars just so old queens will buy them drinks,” Jake says, “But I thought—I mean, you went with that guy. And you asked me to fuck you. You gotta help me out here, Cougs, ‘cause I’m really confused.”

Cougar breathes, slow, careful. Hands loose on his thighs. Fighting his first instinct, to strike out at the source of his pain. To shut Jake the hell up so he’ll stop asking fucked up questions that Cougar has no answers to. To make him stop implying these slurs against Cougar’s manhood.

“Hey,” Jake says, softer now. “Whatever you’re into, and I think I know you well enough to know it’s not kids or the unwilling, whoever you’re looking to have in your bed, I’ve still got your six. We’re still friends. If it’s guys or girls or both or neither. I just gotta know so I don’t bring you somewhere that freaks you out again.”

Cougar sits. He doesn’t know how to say that he wants to not-want. That he wants to be anything other than what Jake is, what Jake’s friends are.

Jake watches him; Cougar can see him frown in his peripheral vision. He waits for Jake to give up, kick him out, out of his truck and his life. 

“Fuck,” Jake finally sighs. “Look, I gotta go get Sophie from school.”

“I am no fit company,” Cougar says at last and Jake nods.

“It’s fine. I’ll drop you off at the house,” and as they drive, he sighs, “What the hell, man?” but he sounds more sad than angry.

 

====================

Cougar goes into the house as Jake pulls away, angry with himself for having so little self-control, angry at Jake for bringing him somewhere that he would have to. He wants to punch holes in the walls, to feel his knuckles tear, the dull impact against his bones. He finds the tools and the spackling compound instead and picks up where he had left off, a steady thump-thump-scrape that calms his mind, puts his hands to work.

He finishes one wall and by then his stomach is cramping as he tries to digest his meal and work both, his body protesting the surge in activity. He cleans up and checks his phone (no messages, but then nobody has this number except for his team). He lies down, stretching out on sheets that smell like Jake. The hum of the air-conditioner and the fullness of his belly lull him to sleep and he doesn’t wake up again until he hears Jake’s key in the front door, his voice calling “Cougs? You here?” 

Jake comes into the bedroom with an armload of plastic dishes and paper bags. “Teresa cooked,” he says and hands one to Cougar. He opens it, but isn’t sure what he’s looking at. Piles of lettuce and a glob of sour cream. The smell of cumin and chili, fresh onion. Meat maybe, somewhere in there. 

“Taco salad,” Jake grins, like he hadn’t been disappointed when he left, like Cougar is still his friend. “She’s only been in Texas for two months, you gotta give her a break. Just don’t expect anything like Mexican and it’s actually edible. A hell of a lot better than the nachos supreme they serve in London, I can tell you that much.” 

They sit and eat. Jake digs in one of the paper bags and brings out a pair of bottles of Sangría Señorial, pops the top off of one with a multi-tool from his pocket and passes it over with a grin. Cougar has to smile back because it’s been years since he had this stuff, dark red and not too sweet, tart and richer than North American style sodas. It brings back good memories, of family gatherings, the children drinking this while the adults get the real stuff.

“Gracias,” he says to Jake, and he means for more than the food and drink. For this, for them, for Jake letting him get away with being an asshole.

“De nada,” Jake answers with a shrug, and they eat, the quiet stretching out between them. Jake takes a sip of his soda, head tipping back, the slender neck of the bottle in his hand, throat working as he swallows. 

The sudden surge of want clenches in Cougar’s chest, and his hand tightens on the fork to keep from reaching out, to keep from touching.

“Saw you worked on the living room,” Jake says as they’re finishing up. “Looks good.”

Cougar shrugs his acknowledgment. “Something to do,” he says and Jake nods.

“You wanna go walk once the sun goes down?”

They work on the house a little while longer, and when it’s not so bright out they leave the air-conditioning for the outside world, Jake setting an easy pace, Cougar feeling his body starting to be like his own again.

“Sorry if I was a dick today,” Jake says as they walk. 

“It wasn’t you,” Cougar says, and knows that’s mostly true. 

Jake makes an “Eh,” sort of noise, like he doesn’t care if he gets the blame. “I was nosy, and you know you can just tell me to butt out, right?”

“Si.”

Which Jake seems to take as permission to go right back to his curiosity, like a dog gnawing a bone.

“Hunky’s freaked you out. I just don’t get why?”

Cougar stops walking, fully prepared to go back to the house to keep from having this conversation twice in one day, but Jake stops him with a light touch on his elbow.

“Hey, wait, no. I’m not asking why. If you could tell me why, you would, right?”

They stand there on the sidewalk of the cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood while Cougar calms himself again.

“I would,” he agrees and Jake bobs his head like the plastic dog that Pooch puts on the dashboard of whatever vehicle he’s driving.

“I’m not saying I’ll never ask again, because I’m a curious kind of guy, but I get it if you’re not ready. And I wanted to say if there’s anything you wanted to ask me, anything I can talk about to help you out, just let me know. No quid pro quo, no truth or dare. Just ask.”

Cougar nods and doesn’t know if he ever will, but it is nice to have the offer, to know that Jake isn’t angry, isn’t expecting more than he can give.

They walk on, looping around the block and heading back to the house. Jake takes first watch as they settle down. In the quiet and the dark, Jake says, “I tried dating. A while ago. This guy named Marco. He was a good guy. Didn’t get why I wouldn’t stay after we fucked though, y’know? I tried to tell him. Not the whole thing, not why but just that I’d been in the army and woke up fighting sometimes.” 

Jake sighs soft and low. “He thought it was bullshit. That if I cared about him that I’d never hurt him. That if I didn’t stay, I wasn’t making a commitment, that it was just sex between us.” He laughs like it hurts. “I stayed there and awake for three nights, and then I fell asleep. I broke his nose, coming up, and he called me a monster. Said he never wanted to see me again.”

Cougar isn’t sure what to say to that, what Jake needs to hear. 

“I was as honest as I know how to be, and he heard what he wanted to.” Jake’s head turns towards Cougar, but he can’t see his face in the dark. “I’m not making the same mistake, am I?”

“You are my friend,” Cougar says, “It helps that you are here.”

Jake lets out a slow breath and a quiet “Okay,” and they go to sleep. When Cougar wakes in the middle of the night, Jake is sound asleep in his own bed, the 9mm on the sheets beside him. Cougar closes his eyes again and sleeps. All is well.

==================

On Wednesday, Jake goes to run an errand and comes back with a treadmill in the back of his truck. It looks used, but gym-grade and they set it up on the freshly painted floor of the living room. Even though the doctor said to wait until the second week to start building stamina again, Cougar starts walking, sometimes jogging, as much as he can stand.

On Thursday, they drive up to a little hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant, tucked into a pothole-cratered plaza between a Washateria and nail salon. Cougar doesn’t have high hopes looking at the place, but the food is amazing, just the right blend of spicy and sweet and he is fascinated when Jake chats to the waitress in her own language, lips shaped to form the foreign words.

On Friday, Jake goes to work and Cougar lays down in Jake’s bed and takes himself in his hand, slow and lazy, not even sure if he’s fit enough yet. He thinks of Jake, sweaty and dusted with plaster. Jake, dressed like a yuppie in his khaki pants and button-down shirt. Jake in fatigues, Jake in dress greens, Jake naked and pressing against him. Jake’s fingers in his hair. He comes, gasping and panting. He falls asleep naked and is barely awake in time to get dressed before Jake comes to get him before picking Sophie up at school.

Saturday night, Jake says “Hey Cougs, I’m taking the girls to church tomorrow, you wanna come?”

He doesn’t know how Jake could do such a thing, could be what he is and want to be close to God at the same time, so he shakes his head. He does three miles on the treadmill while they’re out. Afterward, Jake takes them all out for ice cream.

That becomes their pattern, Jake’s shifts at the salon, Cougar working on the house or just working out. Jake takes them to a pastel-colored gym on Tuesday, where they know Jake and Carlos Alvarez is apparently already a member. Jake just shrugs like he has no idea how that happened, and Cougar doesn’t know if he paid for it behind his back or if he hacked the system and stole him a membership. They spot each other using the free-weights and Cougar is sore as hell the next day, but it feels good, feels real.

Thursday morning they go to a gun range, rent handguns and a pair of lanes and shoot until it’s time to pick up Sophie. Jake brings rollerblades for her, and he and Cougar jog around the park with the little girl on a tow-line, yelling for them to go faster.

Thursday night, Jake says “Hey, you wanna check out one of those MMA places? See if we can get you some good hand-to-hand?” 

Cougar isn’t sure he’s ready to fight, but the worst that can happen is that he’ll lose, and he’s not so attached to his ego that he won’t take that risk.

Jake is quiet on the ride. Quiet for Jake, at least. “These guys,” he says at last, “I’ve got no reason to think anything bad of any of them.”

Cougar tips his head, listening.

“But I don’t know them either, and they don’t know me.” 

Cougar takes that to mean that Jake hides who he is, what he is, from these people. That he doesn’t have reason to trust them. He takes it to mean that Jake won’t be standing so close or grinning so wide, that his eyes won’t be so bright when he looks at Cougar. It makes him sad that Jake, who is so strong in his self, so at peace, has to hide again, if only for a few hours.

They pull up outside a warehouse in an industrial part of town, tin-sided and car-sized air-handlers running outside to pump cool air into the building. Jake grabs a duffel bag out of the back and visibly squares himself and they go in together.

Inside is about what Cougar expected. Hanging heavy bags and free weights, a ring in the center of the room and practice mats off to the back. It smells of sweat and testosterone, rubber and leather and faintly of mold. Seems clean though, the lights bright enough and the bare cement floors swept clear. 

It looks like they’ve come in mid-practice. About twenty men are gathered around the ring in fight gear and gloves. In the middle are two fighters and a ref. From the opposite corners two coaches shout advice and motivation. When one match ends the ref points out two guys of the gathered crowd and they’ll switch into the ring and the fight will start again.

Jake moves with confidence nearer to the ring, but he’s light on his feet, thrumming with hidden tension. Cougar can’t help but pick up on it, instinctively angles himself so they’re covering more of the room, a closed-off unit of two.

One of the corner coaches notices them coming in, a long-haired guy about Cougar’s height but a denser build. He gives them a curt nod of acknowledgment and goes back to yelling “Your left! Keep your left up! God-damn it!” 

They watch a few matches. Cougar glances at Jake to see how he’s taking it and sees him intent on the ring, the competition, eyes bright and hungry. 

The coach pulls one of the waiting fighters up to man his corner and climbs down to walk over and introduce himself as Eliot, the owner. His handshake is firm but not too tight, his demeanor calm, controlled.

“You guys here to fight?” he asks.

Jake sucks in his lower lip and holds it in his teeth, looks to Cougar to decide for them both.

And fuck it. He’s probably going to get his ass handed to him, but he can see how much Jake wants this, to let loose and compete.

“Si,” he answers, “What do we do?”

There’s paperwork to fill out and Cougar needs to buy gloves and a mouth-guard. Jake changes glasses for contacts in the locker room and they head to ringside. Jake bounces on the toes of his feet, makes some practice-swings in the air and then he’s being given a hand into the ring. Eliot stays on the floor by Cougar, in the center of one side of the ring. 

Jake’s first opponent isn’t much of a challenge. A big kid, beefy but inexperienced. Telegraphs his swings and falls for Jake’s feints, leaves himself open to a series of jabs to the head and over-commits to a return punch that Jake turns into a throw and lays him out on the mat, elbow caught in an arm-bar and the kid taps out. Jake helps him up from the mat and turns to slide out of the ring but the ref stops him. 

“First night, winner stays,” the ref says a nd calls in another fighter. Jake glances over at Cougar, but the energy of the gym still feels excited but not ugly. An evaluation then, not a hazing. Cougar shrugs and Jake turns back to the ref, taps gloves with the next guy and they circle around. This one is more experienced, slower to commit, more sophisticated in his combos. He catches Jake a good kick to the ribs but Jake turns with it, catching his foot and twisting him to the ground. The guy strikes out with the other and Jake backs off, dancing on the balls of his feet and looking for an opening. 

They trade blows and Jake’s eyes meet Cougar’s again as they fall apart. Not afraid, just checking. Trusting Cougar to make sure everything is still cool there on the ground.

“He’s looking better,” Eliot comments to Cougar. “It’s good to see.”

“Que?” Cougar asks, because better than what?

“He came a few times a couple years back,” says Eliot, like Cougar should know this. “Hair’s grown out and the goatee is new but I recognize his moves. He was jumpy as all hell, tons of talent but no focus. Couldn’t fight his match for watchin’ the perimeter.”

Cougar nods, can see it, Jake fresh from the army and all these macho guys looking like his enemies. 

“I made sure he got put against the cleanest fighters we had, but not much else I could do. He came a few times and then we never saw him again.”

In the ring, Jake rolls up his opponent and gets the pin. They stand together and he shakes Jake’s hand. 

The next guy is thick, long-armed and short-legged and the second the bell rings he wades in through Jake’s blows and wraps him up, bearing him down to the mat with a thud. Jake blocks it from becoming a ground-and-pound by locking his long legs around the guy’s waist, arching back to keep him off but he’s not quick enough to stop himself from being flipped over, his legs held and back bowed. Jake taps out and his opponent lets go immediately, helping Jake up off of the mat. They say something too quiet for Cougar to hear and then Jake is sliding out of the ring, grin wide and open, hair spiky with sweat and his skin shining with it.

Cougar smirks and tosses a towel at his face. 

“Did you see that guy?” Jake asks with a grin.

“You’re on deck,” Eliot tells Cougar and the three of them watch the next match together and then it’s Cougar’s turn in the ring.

His opponent is a lean, little Caucasian guy, fast as hell and quick to retreat. Cougar closes tight with him against the ropes, rabbit-punches to the stomach and a knee to the ribs. He gets hold of the guy’s wrist and in the middle of the move realizes that it’s going to dislocate the man’s elbow if he follows through so he lets go mid-maneuver. So much of what he knows is less than useful in a friendly fight. They break apart and Cougar is breathing heavy, feeling how out of condition he is, how badly he needed the extra days of cardio that he’s skipped in favor of this. 

It’s luck that he blocks a kick and his opponent stumbles on the recovery, that Cougar spins him and darts in. He gets his arm around the man’s throat from behind, brings him to the ground and holds on as he wriggles like an eel to get free. 

He taps out before he’s choked out and Cougar is the one seeing black spots in his vision. The ref is calling Cougar a new opponent but Cougar slides out of the ring and Jake is there, propping him up, tapping his cheek. He gets a few lungfuls of air and the spots recede. Eliot passes him a bottle of water and he gulps it down, dumps some on his face. 

“I’m good,” he says and stands on his own and Jake backs off. They watch the fights, Jake going in twice more.

When the matches are all done and they get ready to leave, Eliot stops them to say to Jake, “Hey, there’s a pro, semi-pro night on Mondays, invite only. We’d like to have you.” He turns to Cougar, “You too once you get back to one hundred percent.” They don’t have to ask how he can tell Cougar has the potential, or how Eliot knows he’s recovering.

Jake shrugs, “Maybe,” and Cougar shakes his head.

“Won’t be around that long.”

Eliot nods. “Y’all come by Monday anyway, if you want. Any of the open-fight days are good too.”

“So,” Jake says in the truck on the way back. Glances over at Cougar and back to the road. “You and Eliot. You guys talked while I was getting my ass kicked.”

Cougar snorts because there was a lot more kicking than being kicked going on up there. 

Jake looks over again and waggles his eyebrows. “Seriously? Is my gaydar that defective?” And of course Jake would misunderstand. He grins but it seems strained. “Hey, I know we’ve got this whole platonic house-mates thing going on, but I’m no cock-block. You wanna get your dick wet, you’ve got my support. We need to take separate rides in next time? I can borrow Teresa’s car…”

Cougar has to suck his cheeks in and bite down to keep from laughing out loud, which would be the wrong thing to do because Jake may be hilariously crude about it, but his tone is a forced sort of light.

“I don’t want Eliot,” he says and it’s the truth.

Jake shrugs and they pull into the driveway. “Look, if it’s a matter of not fucking where you sleep…” Cougar stops him by resting a hand on the nape of his neck. He doesn’t know whether to be sad that Jake’s working so hard to foist him off on another man or insulted that Jake would think him such a poor friend as to out himself and Jake by proxy to people that Jake obviously wants that hidden from.

“Jake. I don’t want Eliot.” 

Jake swallows hard and looks down. He’s still in his contacts and he looks vulnerable without his glasses, his lashes soft on his cheeks. Cougar wonders what they would feel like on his lips. He lets go of Jake and pulls away before he caves to the temptation. He’s leaving soon, and if he’s so eager to get fucked he can do it without messing up one of the few real friendships of his life.

 

==============

On Saturday they get up before it gets hot and go for a run. Cougar wonders how the others are doing, Clay and Roque on base, Pooch at his Abuela’s house. Wonders if they’re pushing themselves as hard as Jake is nudging him. He remembers the last time he went to his mother’s home to recuperate, years ago. Being waited on hand and foot, scolded if he tried to do anything but watch television and drink beer. Jake understands that Cougar is returning to the field, that he might be on a mission in as little as two weeks and he doesn’t want Cougar pampered, he wants him strong.

So they run, Jake in his t-shirt, shorts and sneakers, Cougar wearing sweat pants and combat boots. They cut out across the park, ankles soon wet with dew. Sometimes cross-country, sometimes on the paved walkways. Jake sets the pace, keeping Cougar challenged but not exhausted. It becomes a matter of pride, to keep up, to not call a halt. He’s glad to see the spreading patch of sweat between Jake’s shoulder-blades, to know that he’s in good enough shape that Jake is getting a workout at least.

They’re back at the house before he expects it, the air-conditioning sharp and cold. Jake tosses him a towel and orders “Go shower, you stinky, stinky man!” Cougar flips him off but he goes to clean up anyway. He starts with the shower set cooler than his body temperature, feels the water rinsing heat from his scalp. It feels good. He feels good. Thinks about Jake’s shoulders in front of him as they ran, Jake’s strong thighs and perfect rear.

It takes a light touch to bring himself to full hardness, one hand on the shower tile, water streaming down over him. He wraps the other around his cock, firm and steady strokes rolling his foreskin over the head of it and back again with every pull. His lips part as he comes, breath without voice lost in the patter of the shower. He stands there, enjoying the aftershocks, letting himself savor the sensations.

Finally he sighs and straightens and steps out of the shower, but leaves the water still running as he combs his hair and shaves the wayward strands of beard that pop up between sideburns and goatee. When he’s done he shuts off the shower and leaves the room.

He passes Jake in the doorway and smirks at him. He hears Jake yelp out “You fucker!” as the cold water hits him and Cougar’s smirk turns to a full on grin. He wonders if Jake will be half as bossy next time.

When Jake’s done with his shower they head to Teresa’s to pick the girls up for lunch. It feels funny to ride in her beige sedan after so many trips in Jake’s truck, but it’s the only vehicle that’ll hold all four of them. Sophie picks sushi and Jake drives them north to a blue-tile roofed Japanese place with an all-you-can-eat buffet. Cougar stays mostly on the fried-food side of it. Eating raw fish isn’t something he wants to do when he doesn’t have to. He teases Sophie by making faces as she tries the tuna and the roe and is glad when she laughs at him and makes exaggerated faces of enjoyment.

It’s good and simple and it’s easy to fall into the fantasy that this is his life, living with Jake, working hard through the week and relaxing on the weekend with those Jake considers family. He can see the danger in it but doesn’t allow himself to pull away.

They get home mid-afternoon and work on the house a while longer. Jake takes first shower this time, comes out with his beard neatly trimmed and gel spiking his blond hair. He digs through the plastic case he keeps his clothes in and pulls out a pale pink button-down shirt and a clean pair of jeans.

“Going out?” Cougar asks and Jake shoos him into the shower.

“Hell yeah. You promised me dancing. You drink, I’ll drive, it’ll be great.”

Cougar rolls his eyes because Jake is the biggest child he has ever met, but he gets ready anyway and together they go back to the gay district.

They park the truck and Cougar settles his hat more firmly on his head. Jake leads the way down crowded sidewalks to a club—not the one they first met at but close enough that it makes no difference. He pays their way and then they’re pushing into the wall of sound and gyrating bodies, the heavy bass thudding into Cougar’s chest.

“What do you drink?” Jake yells into his ear. “Tequila?”

Cougar shrugs and realizes he doesn’t really want one. Doesn’t want to be fucked, not by a stranger, not here. Not where Jake would see and know what he was doing, who he was doing it with.

“I was supposed to buy,” Cougar protests, because if Jake is going to use his promise to get him here, he’ll damn well let Cougar get the tab.

Jake snorts and waves him off, grinning and bouncing on his toes, just as eager as he had been getting into the MMA ring as he weaves through the crowd to the bar. Cougar finds a place by the wall and wonders just how badly the evening will end. Jake finds him a few minutes later, balancing a shot of tequila, a beer chaser and a glass of soda in his big hands.

Cougar downs the shot, grateful for the distracting burn of it, the cool bitterness of the beer after.

Jake leans against the wall beside him, drinks a few sips of his Coke. “So what’s your type?”

Cougar smirks and waves him away. “You came to dance, go dance.”

He half-expects Jake to drag him out to the floor, debates with himself just how much resistance to put up, what moves to use, because of all the things Cougar does well, dancing is not one of them. Jake looks him over, considering, and then hands him his half-full glass and slips out onto the floor.

If anything, Jake is a worse dancer than Cougar. His enthusiasm is boundless and his sense of rhythm a quarter-beat off. He grins and bounces and dances with some pretty Asian boy, turns and shimmies with a blond who is taller than he is. Jake’s partners put up with his lack of skill because he is beautiful, tall and lean, the club lights shining on his skin as he works up a fine sheen of sweat.

A man comes to stand beside Cougar, dark hair, dark clothes, stark black goatee. He smirks sideways and pointedly glances from the glass Cougar is holding out to where Jake is making a fool of himself on the dance floor.

“He yours?” the man asks.

“Mi amigo,” Cougar replies and he’s not sure for a second if the guy will go chat up Jake or if he himself is the target.

“Are you mine?”

The man oozes sleazy sexiness, polished seduction, a practiced script. Cougar can be sure the man will use him and not ask him to stay when they’re done, if they even get to a bed in the first place.

Before Jake, he would have agreed for a night. Would have let himself be fucked, hurt, tossed away. Before Jake he would have wanted every aching minute of it, savored the pain as a way to distract from his own disgust at himself.

“No.” His tone is cold, final. The man looks him over again, intrigued.

“Too bad,” he says, “You and your friend have a nice night.”

Cougar nods and looks back to the dance floor, scanning for Jake’s height, his blond hair and pink shirt. When he catches sight of him again Jake is coming his way, a pair of shot glasses in his hands. He grins and looks half-relieved about something as he trades Cougar the soda for the pair of shots.

“Que?” Cougar asks when Jake doesn’t start talking right away.

Jake shrugs and gulps down the soda, crunches up some ice and swallows before he answers. “I was a little worried you’d leave with El Diablo.”

Cougar questions the statement with a raise of his eyebrow.

“Anybody who works that hard to look evil is not going to be caring and sharing in bed.”

Cougar watches the dancers for a while. Thinks about telling Jake he wouldn’t know caring if it fell into his lap. Imagines Jake’s face if he said he’s always looked for the opposite of caring before. He drops the still-full shot glasses onto the tray of a passing drinks-boy and shrugs. “I didn’t leave my hat in the truck.” When Jake looks puzzled he elaborates, “Guys like that always have to fuck with the hat.”

Jake’s lips quirk into a crooked grin. “You wanna get out of here?”

He does. More than anything. Wants to go back to Jake’s work-in-progress of a home and let Jake lay him out on the sagging mattress and touch him and not hurt him. He wants to know what it’s like, just once.

He nods and they leave, half-deaf as they step out into the humid Dallas night. Jake turns down the sidewalk instead of going straight back to the truck though, leads him to a lime-colored restaurant that serves burritos the size of his arm. There are gay men there, behind the bar and filling the booths, but it feels more like an overflow from the clubs than lunch at Hunky’s had.

They eat and Cougar shakes the buzz from the single shot he’d drunk.

“So it was a little early for this, huh?”

He looks up at Jake.

Jake shrugs. “You’ve still got a week. Seems a criminal shame to waste the chance, on leave, in a city with no military base closer than two hours drive.”

Cougar pushes his food away. “Later,” he agrees, but knows he’s stalling and intends to keep stalling until he’s back at Bragg. That he won’t get fucked this week, won’t let someone use him, not when Jake will be there after, will see on Cougar’s face that it was bad and he’d wanted it to be bad.

They finish their late-night meal and then Cougar’s in no rush to go back to the house where Jake won’t lay him down, won’t fuck him tonight. They walk, up the brightly lit, raucous blocks of Oak Lawn and then east one and back down through a neighborhood of small but posh apartment complexes and little houses.

==============

 

The days slip past, one by one. On Sunday, Jake takes his sister and niece to church. He leaves the truck in case Cougar needs it. He thinks about it for a while, keys in hand, and then he pulls on his best shirt and cleanest jeans and drives off.

He’s not sure where he’s going. There’s no side of town that’s more immigrant than the other, just little pockets of Hispanic stores and restaurants clumped together here and there. He finds what he’s looking for between a thrift store and auto parts place, a little storefront-church with a full parking lot. He’s been to one like this before, when the pomp and weight of a Catholic service was too much to bear, when he wanted to be a stranger among strangers, people trying to find a home.

The chairs are plastic and all full and Cougar stands at the back with some other men, hat in hand and head bowed as the preacher speaks in rapid Spanish, words of love and compassion and peace. There is no shame in the sermon, no castigation of sin.

Cougar drops a twenty into the collection plate as it’s passed by him and sneaks out as everyone else is lining up for communion.

He’s back at Jake’s house before Jake comes to pick him up for after-church lunch at Teresa’s.

==========

Monday they go to the invite-only night at the MMA gym and Cougar watches as Jake gets taken down again and again. Another man may have become frustrated at the losses and walked away, but Jake just looks thoughtful, calculates what he’s done wrong and how to not do it again. He gives every opponent a good fight though, and his last match of the night he gets the choke hold on for the win.

“You guys want to come out for beers after?” Eliot asks them. Cougar would say yes but Jake’s quick to turn him down.

“Can’t. Work tomorrow,” and Cougar knows that Jake never has Tuesday shifts.

=======

On Wednesday night they paint the whole house, sprayers in hand, masked against the fumes, huge fans blowing the overspray out of the open doors. It’s hot and ugly work, even if the sun is already down.

“Should be ready to put on the market in two months, maybe less,” Jake announces when they’re through with the huge project. “I need to start looking for another house.”

=========

He’s supposed to have another weekend, doesn’t need to get his ass back to Bragg before Monday night. Still, he’s not surprised when his phone rings while they’re at the park with Sophie on Friday.

“Si,” he answers, as Jake looks curious for just a second before he walks away with his niece to give Cougar some privacy.

“Where are you at?” Clay asks, all brusque efficiency.

“Dallas.”

“They’re pulling us back to duty,” Clay says, “Backup for another team. Flying out tomorrow night if we’re all fit.”

And they’re on god-damn medical leave and Cougar knows he isn’t back to full strength yet, but Clay wouldn’t have let them be recalled without a fight, and no point in bitching about it when it’s already a done deal.

“You fit, Cougar?”

“Si.”

“Give me your address and I’ll have a car from Hood come get you. They’ll call when they’re on the way.”

Cougar tells him Jake’s address, and Clay hangs up. He watches Jake and Sophie kicking a soccer ball around on the field for a while, until Jake’s worried gaze catches his.

“Everything okay?” Jake says as he jogs over.

“Si. Colonel called. Leaving tonight.”

Jake’s lips press together but he doesn’t argue like Cougar expected him to.

“Let’s grab you some food before we take Sophie home. One last meal of real food before you’re back to base. Anything else you need to do besides pack your stuff?”

“No.” Somehow Jake’s efficient processing of the situation is making him feel more guilty, rather than less.

“Sophie!” Jake calls, “Let’s wrap it up! Pizza night!”

They eat and Cougar savors every moment, the good food but more than that Jake’s smiles and Sophie’s pouting that Cougar is leaving earlier than expected.

Cougar’s phone rings as they’re leaving the restaurant, a corporal from Hood letting him know he’s about two hours out.

Jake drops Sophie off at her mother’s and drives Cougar back to the house. “I’ll take pictures of the house for you,” he promises as they go inside. “Of what it looks like when it’s finished, in case you don’t get back before I sell it.” Like Cougar returning to Dallas is a foregone conclusion.

Cougar doesn’t have much to pack. Some shirts he’d pulled out to decide between once, and a bag of dirty laundry that he thought he’d have time to wash before he left that goes into a garbage bag before being stuffed into his duffel.

They sit on the edge of the bed and wait, not much time for anything else. Jake takes the phone from Cougar’s hand and puts his number into it.

“Call me this time, asshole.”

Cougar makes no promises to Jake, but he silently vows that it won’t be months without some communication this time.

There’s a beep of a car’s horn out front and Jake walks him to the door. This is why it is a bad idea for a soldier to form attachments outside of his unit, the pain of saying goodbye, knowing he could leave and never return.

“Hey,” Jake says, sad but smiling. “Sorry you didn’t get laid, I thought I had another weekend to work with.”

And fuck it. Fuck waiting and wanting and denying himself. Fuck pretending that he doesn’t want the one thing he does.

Cougar’s bag hits the floor and he steps forward, crowding Jake back against the wall, catching him with one hand at the nape of his neck and the other at his hip. Jake’s blue eyes go wide, startled. Cougar’s heart pounds in his chest. He’s done this with women, but he has never kissed a man, never had to look up to brush his lips to another’s.

He pauses, half a second to let Jake accept or protest, and then he’s kissing him, slow and sure and deep, using every bit of skill he’s cultivated with women even as his mind is cataloging the strangeness of it, Jake’s beard against his chin, Jake’s strong hands coming up to grab his shoulders and hold him close. Jake so damn tall and broad. Cougar moans and his skill deserts him and he’s devouring Jake’s mouth, hungry and desperate to tell him “I only wanted you, idiot,” and only the kiss to express himself with.

There’s a second beep from outside and in a second his driver will leave the car and come to the door and if he sees them both, red-lipped and flushed with passion, Cougar may as well write a memo before the rumors fly, he’ll be outed just as well either way.

“Dios,” he breathes and pulls away. Picks up the hat he hadn’t even realized he’d dropped and puts it back on his head. Jake lets him go, stunned and leaning against the wall, eyes wide and lips parted. Cougar grabs his bag and hurries out the door.

He hears Jake shout his name, once, but he doesn’t chase after him, doesn’t make a scene. Cougar slides into the waiting car and doesn’t look back.

=============

“You do know the point of time off was for you to eat, right?” Clay looks less than pleased.

Cougar drops his bag and holds his hands out, shoulder height, palms down, and holds them there. His hands are rock-solid, no tremble, no shake. He knows he’s still underweight, too thin. Wiry. If they get into trouble on this mission he’ll have fewer eserves to draw on.

Clay looks at his face instead of his hands, like he can peel away a mask and find the truth he’s looking for.

“Put your hands down,” Clay finally grouses at him. “What have you been doing?”

Cougar picks up his bag and Clay walks with him to the barracks room they’re using for the one night’s sleep before they fly out again.

“Eating,” Cougar says with a smirk. “Fixing a house, road work, hand-to-hand sparring.”

Clay makes a noise that sounds a little like approval. “Better skinny and fit than chubby and soft, I guess.”

They join the other team the next night, and somehow get lucky enough to spend three weeks running backup in the jungle without meeting up with a single enemy.

===============

Cougar checks his official e-mail when they get back to the States, and there among the spam and professional messages is a single personal mail, and in that mail a single line of text:

“COUGAR! WHAT THE EVER-LOVING FUCK WAS THAT? This isn’t over.”

He smirks and deletes it. He’ll call Jake soon.

================  
“Roque and I rented a house, four bedrooms. Pooch is taking one and the last is empty,” Clay says as he watches Cougar field-stripping the rifles he’ll use for the next op. Cougar doesn’t answer, not sure what the hell this has to do with him.

“It’s not healthy for a man to sleep and eat and work all in the same place for too long,” he adds, and Cougar swabs the inner workings, tilting the metal bits to catch the light.

“You’re moving in with us, and that’s an order!” Clay finally snaps and Cougar looks up at him. Oh. “Your split is four-hundred a month and if we get another full-time member you and Pooch fight it out to see who he bunks with.”

That thought makes him smirk, but he nods to Clay and goes back to work, wondering how this will change things, being closer still to these men.

He writes his madre a letter and sends it with that month’s check, telling her he’ll have less to send now, and that he’s living off-base. On impulse, he puts the home phone number at the bottom. As much as he hates dodging her calls, he cannot stomach the idea of leaving her no way to try.

Of course she calls, gets Pooch all riled up, “Dude, she’s your momma, take the damn phone!” until he starts making himself scarce whenever it rings. Sometimes he’ll listen from the other side of the wall as they talk, can imagine his madre and her broken English, asking Pooch if Carlos is eating, if he’s found a girl-friend, if he’s happy.

================

“I thought your family was in southern California,” Roque says as they’re riding a Humvee over a broken desert wasteland. He has to yell over the bump and rattle of the pitted road, but nobody else could hear.

Cougar shrugs, knows the others see his mail as it comes in, his mother’s neat print on the envelopes, a letter every week.

“What the hell is in Dallas then?”

“Mi Amigo,” Cougar says, “Jake.” Even bringing his name here seems like a risk or a betrayal.

He doesn’t provide any more information and Roque doesn’t ask again.

 

================

 

Cougar has a fuck-with list; the only problem is it has no names on it. He can’t ask Clay, can’t ask anyone he knows, because there will be questions, questions whose answers could get him thrown out or worse. A week of down-time (on hold, confined to base, waiting to see which of three ongoing missions will need them to run clean-up operations), drives him restless. He finds himself looking into the eyes of the soldiers he passes, wondering if they were there, the night Jake was hurt.

He needs to know the names, the faces. He needs a tech, someone soft enough for him to push without pushing back, someone intimidated enough to keep their mouth shut and not ask questions. Someone he outranks.

Current techs are easier to stalk than past connections between soldiers and Cougar chooses fresh blood for his prey, a scrawny twenty-something kid with a twitchy personality. He’s not special forces, but better with computers than anyone currently serving who has survived Q. His security clearances are high and he gets loaned out to different teams when his skills are needed.

Cougar needs his skills. He waits until the kid is in the dining hall, comes over and sits across from him, stares silently until the kid freezes, staring up like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming semi.

“Walk with me, Private,” Cougar says and the kid gets up, leaves his lunch and follows Cougar out the door.

“I need a list of names,” Cougar tells him when they’re out of earshot of everyone, taking the long walk out towards the sniper range. “Around two years ago, there was a soldier, probably stationed at Fort Hood. Special forces.” And he hopes that’s right, that Jake isn’t one of a thousand posers in the world, claiming to be things they’re not.

“His name is Jake Jensen. I need to know the names of the men he last served with. You will get me these names and then forget we spoke. Understand?”

The kid nods like there’s a spring loose in his neck. “Yeah, I can do…wait, Jake Jensen? Jacob Alan Jensen? J-Mageddon?”

Cougar pins him with a look, knowing he’ll keep talking if Cougar doesn’t.

“He was one of us, dude, and then he was one of you guys and…” the tech’s eyes go wide and then narrow suddenly. “That was years ago,” he says and Cougar doesn’t like where this was going. “Why would you care?” he blinks. “How would you know? Oh, shit, you know him? Jensen?”

Cougar can almost see the gears turning in the kid’s head. “Oh-em-gee, are you dating J-Mageddon? Seriously?”

Cougar looks around but nobody seems to have heard, nobody close enough to hear, even though the kid’s voice keeps getting higher. Panic clenches in his chest and he steps into the kid’s personal space. He growls, “Say that again and I’ll kill you.”

“No,” the kid breathes, eyes wide. “Hey, no, sorry. But. It was a shitty thing that happened. He was one of us. Geek solidarity. I’ll get you those names.”

He looks to see if Cougar is going to murder him on the spot, and when he doesn’t, the kid gives him a quick salute and then turns and jogs away.

Cougar continues on to the sniper range, the long distances of it making it the furthest from barracks except for artillery. He settles himself in one of the blinds, comfortable even without his rifle. He takes his phone out, scrolls through his few contacts, thumb resting on the keys.

Before two on a Tuesday . Jake should be at home, maybe eating lunch. Cougar presses talk and listens to the soft trilling as the phone connects. Jake’s bright “Hello?” and it all seems a million miles away.

“Hola,” he says, and hears Jake laugh.

“Cougs?”

“Si.”

“Good to hear from you, man. I wasn’t sure. The way we left things, you know?”

Cougar closes his eyes, listens to Jake breathe on the other end.

“You still there?”

“Si.”

“Not much of a phone guy?”

“No.”

“Then I’m flattered as hell that you’d call,” Jake says and Cougar smiles at the thought of it.

“Cougs,” Jake says, soft and low. “What the hell was that? I just…I thought you weren’t into me like that.”

Cougar sighs. “Jake.” And he doesn’t know what else to say. “Face to face, si?”

“Yeah,” Jake answers, “I can wait.”

Then Jake starts talking, about the progress on the house and Sophie’s new soccer team, his latest nights sparring at Eliot’s gym and the guys there. Cougar is glad to hear it, to feel he’s given Jake even this little bit of his self back.

He listens to Jake until his phone is warm against his ear and beeping plaintively that its battery is at the end of its life.

“Call me again sometime, okay?” Jake asks, and Cougar nods even though Jake is far from him.

“Si. I will.”

They hang up without words of endearment and Cougar wonders if this is even possible, even if they both want it—to build a life together in the brief days and weeks of any year that Cougar hasn’t already obligated himself to his team.

He thinks of Jake’s smile and Jake’s shoulder bumping his and he knows if it can be done, that he wants to try.

 

===============

 

Cougar thinks he’s going to have to track down his semi-willing accomplice in the quest for naming Jake’s attackers. He doesn’t expect him to run across half the courtyard to intercept Cougar in the middle of the afternoon, all puffed up like a Bantam rooster.

“What the fuck, man?” he hisses at Cougar and Cougar hustles him out of sight before they catch the attention of the base’s rumor-mill.

“What?” Cougar asks.

The tech’s hands flutter around in impotent anger. “You didn’t tell me he didn’t want you to know!” he protests. “Did that not seem important?”

Cougar glares and the kid swallows, gets himself under a modicum of control.

“He locked me out of my own system,” the tech complains. “For half the night I’ve been arguing with a purple CGI rabbit to please go away without reformatting my hard drive.” He gulps. “He said to tell the big kitty that it’s been taken care of a long time ago and not worth new trouble.”

Cougar frowns. Yeah, Jake may have had these guys on his fuck-with list for a long time, but that’s different than Cougar getting to personally take it out of their hides.

“Look,” says the tech, “You’re a scary dude and all and I seriously don’t want to fuck with you, but this is J-Mageddon, and his reach and his memory are both pretty fucking long and he can mess up my entire life in ways you can’t even imagine.”

The tech is freaked out. As many missions as he’s been on, despite being shot at by enemy combatants, yelled at by drill sergeants and special forces COs, despite being outright threatened by Cougar, the fear of Jake Jensen’s anger is enough to have him shaking in his boots.

Cougar’s lips twitch, and he cannot smile now, with his reputation and his secrets at stake.

But inside? There’s a perverse part of him that glows with pride, that even years after he’s left the military, his Jake has the power to make professional hackers quake in fear of his anger.

“Leave it,” Cougar tells the tech. “I’ll find another way.”

A week later the team is sent to crack a gun-runner’s base and get a list of vendors, and if Cougar keeps an eye on their twitchy tech, it’s nothing he wouldn’t do to protect any asset. Really.

 

==========================

Cougar buys a second bike and has it shipped to Fort Hood, but the next time he’s free for more than a day it’s winter in Texas and not riding weather and he doesn’t have time to wait for a transport to happen to be going his way. He flies commercial out of Fayetteville instead, his dress greens getting him a same-day ticket at a price that doesn’t bankrupt his checking account; he knows from experience that the ticket counter is a lot kinder to active military with a surprise few days of leave than a spic wanting to travel cross-country at the last minute. 

He leaves the beret in his locker on base, though. Damn thing always catches too much attention—guys who want to ask questions, who want to be him without even the work of becoming regular Army, or women who want to see if he excels in other areas as well. The greens alone get him as much unwelcome conversation as he can stand, old men reminiscing about their glory days and young kids asking if he’s ever killed anyone.

He stops in a bathroom before the TSA checkpoint, and goes through his bag again, making sure he left all his weapons behind, that he didn’t casually drop a blade in his bag without thinking of it. It’s been years since he’s flown out of a civilian airport, since he’s had somewhere to get to in a hurry that the Army wasn’t sending him, back before 9/11 and flying got so crazy. The last time he visited his family.

Security goes smooth and he’s standing at the gate waiting for his flight when he realizes that in his rush to take advantage of the unexpected leave, he hasn’t called Jake yet. He takes out his phone and flips through the call history. Even though his last call to Jake is only the third back, it was almost a month ago. He’s not sure how often men call each other, men who have kissed and may kiss again, but he’s pretty sure it is more often than this.

He wonders again if he can do this. If he can be something permanent in Jake’s life. If Jake even wants that from him. He has walked through minefields and felt more sure of his steps.

Still, he knows he’s getting on the plane. Knows he’ll be in Dallas in a few hours. He can sit at the airport for three days or he can call Jake, and the sooner the better so he presses ‘talk’ and listens to the phone dial.

“Cougs?” Jake sounds glad to hear from him and something in Cougar’s chest loosens.

“Si. Hola.”

“Hey man, what’s up?” 

“Wheels, in twenty minutes.”

“Mission?” 

Cougar only feels a little sadistic drawing it out. “Three days leave. I land at DFW in three hours.”

“Yeah?” And if Cougar has doubts that Jake wants to be with him, he at least knows Jake is pleased with the thought of seeing him again. “You need a ride?”

“Si. If you’re free. Gate A-19 at…” his brain stumbles as he translates the ticket to military time and then back again because Jake has been using a civilian clock for two years or more. “Six PM.”

“Gotcha,” Jake says, and then the intercom is calling Cougar’s flight to board and he has to go.

“Adios,” Cougar says, and Jake answers, “See you soon.”

=========

The flight is short. Cougar’s seat-mate is a teen girl attached to her I-phone, and she doesn’t say three words to him. He couldn’t have wished for better, despite the overflow of tinny pop music coming from her earphones. 

He picks up his bag from baggage claim, the only Army duffel on the conveyor belt. He heads outside, looking for the light blue of Jake’s old truck and there it is, pulling to the curb. Sophie’s little hands press against the side window and her face lights up when she sees Cougar. Jake leans over and pops the door for her and she scrambles out to meet him. She runs over but stops short of him, uncertainty taking over at the last second.

Cougar smiles at her and drops to one knee, arms open but not reaching out for her, letting her greet him how she will. She takes the last few steps and wraps her arms quick around his neck and then lets him go. It’s a bright spark of wonder, of life and joy, a tiny sample of things he thought he could never have.

“You came back!” she says. “Jake said you would try to.”

“I did,” he agrees and that seems to be all she was looking for. She grabs his free hand and he shoulders his bag and lets her lead him to the truck. He tosses his bag in the back and opens the door to lift her into the seat, and he sees Jake for the first time in months, grinning and holding a squirming armload of half-grown puppy. The dog is short-haired, floppy-eared, honey-colored with white markings, with the distinctive musculature and pit bull face. 

“Easy, Sugar,” Jake laughs, “Down, girl.” He grins at Cougar. “I didn’t know you’d be all dressed up or I’d have left her home.”

“Dog hair brushes off,” Cougar says with a shrug. Sophie slides across the bench seat and buckles in and then takes Sugar into her lap. 

“Teresa’s making dinner,” Jake says as Cougar gets in the truck and they pull out into traffic. “Chicken and rice, if you want.” And even if he doesn’t, he’s not going to insult Jake’s sister or turn down the chance of a family meal around the table. 

“Sounds good,” he says and lets the puppy sniff at his fingers. 

===========

 

Teresa pushes seconds on him and tries for thirds before he smiles and shakes his head. “If I eat more I will burst,” he says and Sophie uses the distraction to slip Sugar a sliver of her chicken.

“You ready to get out of here?” Jake asks and Cougar nods. 

“It has been a pleasure, señora, señorita.” They smile at his Spanish and call their goodbyes, and Jake’s hand is warm through his jacket where it rests on his lower back as he hurries Cougar out of the door. 

They climb in the truck and Jake gets the heat running. He’s quiet suddenly, in their first moments alone. 

“How long are you in town for?” he asks as he backs out of the driveway.

“Three days, two nights.”

Jake nods. “I’ve still got Sophie after school tomorrow, but I’ll call in at the salon.”

“Si, good,” Cougar answers, and then there’s silence in the truck.

“You didn’t call,” Jake says at last. It doesn’t sound like an accusation, more uncertainty than anything.

Cougar looks down at his hands, at the permanent residue of carbon dust worn into the creases of his skin.

“It is like a different world,” he says at last. “Being there. Thinking of you, here.” 

He has killed six men since he saw Jake last. He wonders if that matters at all.

“Okay,” says Jake. “I can live with that.” He’s silent for another mile and then he admits “I checked. About every week. To make sure your file was still active and not deceased.”

“Jake.” Worry cuts through him. Not that Jake will use classified information in the wrong way, but that he’ll get caught for this, go to jail. “Don’t. The risk.”

Jake shrugs. “I cover my tracks and I don’t look too deep.”

“Don’t,” Cougar repeats. “I’ll put a letter in my locker. To go to you if…” he doesn’t finish the sentence, afraid of cursing his luck.

Jake glances at him at a red light. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll stop snooping.” He sounds distressed enough that Cougar believes him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” Cougar says, and Jake nods. 

“Apology accepted. But I know you’re not a phone guy, and that’s cool. I know I can’t call you without risking catching you with the guys. Just promise me that if something happens and you’re never coming back to Dallas that you’ll let me know, and I’ll stop being such a whiny bitch, okay?”

Jake deserves so much better than that. Deserves a man he can see every day, who can be there for him on the phone, at the very least. Cougar is just selfish enough that he wants to be the man Jake has anyway. He doesn’t know what he has done that Jake will accept his behavior, but he vows again to be a better man. To not fuck this up. He may be a sinner and a maricón, but he’s no idiot.

“Jake,” he says, low and serious, “If this…if I can’t, I’ll tell you. Lo promito.”

Jake nods and forces a grin. “Okay then. Hey, want to stop for ice cream?” 

The corner of Cougar’s mouth twitches. Jake is stalling. Jake is just as nervous as he is. That makes it easier.

“I want to be home,” he says, “With you.”

Jake nods and turns onto the side-street, fingers tapping at the wheel, humming some song that Cougar doesn’t know, or just doesn’t recognize Jake’s off-tune version of. They park and get out and Jake’s still jittery and Cougar just has no frame of reference for what the hell he should say, so he doesn’t.

Jake doesn’t look at him as he unlocks the back door, but he talks. “So, I just need to know. Are we starting over with a ‘maybe,’ or is it back to just friends, or picking up where we left off when you kissed me and ran away?”

Cougar catches him just inside the door, spins Jake’s back against the wall just like last time and locks his fingers behind Jake’s neck, the heels of his hands cupping Jake’s jaw. He leans up and kisses Jake, all hunger and need and no finesse at all. 

“Oh,” Jake breathes when they break away, his lips flushed and eyes wide. “Oh. I can work with that.” He grabs Cougar by the lapels of his dress greens and pulls him back close. There’s more style to the kiss this time, teasing nuzzles and nips, Jake’s hands dancing over Cougar’s shoulders and arms and hips like he’s not sure if he’s allowed. 

They rock against each other, hard through wool and denim and standing against the wall is familiar enough to what Cougar has known before that it’s easy to reach down and unfasten Jake’s jeans.

“Cougs, you don’t…” 

Cougar shuts him up with a grazing bite and Jake shudders at the feel of teeth. His fingers muss up the combed-back straightness of Cougar’s hair, pull the hair-band from his ponytail and let his hair fall loose around his ears. The brush of it makes Cougar feel more free, less in-uniform. 

He goes to his knees and Jake swears. “Been a long time, Cougar,” and it feels like forever since he’s done this, too. Almost a year since he got fucked last, since he had a dick in his mouth. He nuzzles Jake’s cock through the white cotton of his briefs. “Please,” Jake begs, but his hand is gentle in Cougar’s hair. “Not gonna last.”

Cougar doesn’t waste any time then, pulling Jake free of his underwear, taking just a second to appreciate the smooth, thick curve of him before taking it into his mouth, loving how it feels, how it tastes, cheeks burning at the wickedness of his own pleasure. 

“Seriously,” Jake warns, his hips moving in tiny stuttering twitches. Cougar looks up at him, Jake’s dick in his mouth, and Dios, he’s sure he’s never seen such open adoration in any man’s eyes. He bobs his head and takes Jake deeper, not for the pain and the burn but because Jake deserves his best.

“Fuck,” Jake moans, his voice tight as he tries to hold himself back, bites at the heel of his hand to make it last but it’s no use and he’s coming, thick and bitter and salty in Cougar’s mouth. Jake’s hand rests on his head like a priest giving benediction and Cougar’s never had it so gentle, so good. He swallows, because this isn’t some back alley and he’s not spitting on Jake’s floor. This is Jake, and if Cougar’s eyes prickle it’s from trying to get it all down, and from Jake’s dick at the back of his throat. 

Jake takes a shaky breath and sags against the wall, “Cougar, Jesus,” he pants and Cougar feels a swell of pride, that he did this, that he was good enough. He tucks Jake back into his briefs with a crooked smirk and ignores his own throbbing need.

Jake reaches down and pulls Cougar up, smiling and blissed out. He leans in and Cougar dodges the kiss, presses his lips just under Jake’s ear to show he’s not upset, he just can’t imagine wanting to taste that without the benefit of someone actively orgasming. He half-expects a fight, because Jake is contrary like that, but he seems to accept it, wrapping his arms around Cougar and nuzzling in against his hair. “Want you in a bed,” he murmurs, and Cougar has had his longest, roughest fucks in beds, but he trusts Jake and he nods. 

Jake takes his hand and smiles like a stupid teenager, like Cougar is beautiful and precious as he leads him down the hall to the bedroom, their two narrow mattresses on the floor just like last time. Cougar’s hands go to the buttons of his jacket but Jake’s cover them. 

“Please,” Jake asks, so soft, like this is a fantasy he’s had forever. Cougar lowers his hands and Jake runs his fingers through Cougar’s hair and leans in to kiss him, so fucking tender that Cougar doesn’t even know what to do. He lets Jake undress him, jacket and shirt unbuttoned and neatly laid out on one bed. He slides the chain of Cougar’s dog-tags through his hand but doesn’t take them off.

Jake goes to his knees and Cougar is so hard it aches as Jake lifts his feet one at a time to take off his dress shoes and socks, as he unfastens his pants and slides them off of his hips, steadying him as he steps out of them. He wants to beg, wants to swear at Jake for being so damn slow. 

“You too,” he says, and Jake wriggles out of his jacket and jeans and t-shirt, tangles himself in the pants legs and nearly falls but for Cougar grabbing his elbow to steady him. 

He lets Jake lay him down on the bed, his underwear still on, and they kiss, and Cougar doesn’t remember until they’re already into it that he still has Jake’s taste in his mouth but by then it doesn’t matter. Jake’s thigh rubs at his dick, driving him crazy with the friction that’s too much and not-quite enough at the same time. Jake’s fingers tease under the elastic against his waist and Cougar growls at him. “Enough, fuck, that’s enough,” and Jake laughs an apology and sits up to strip the underwear off of him. He freezes, staring at Cougar’s dick, and if this is the deal-breaker, Cougar is going to be seriously pissed.

Then a slow smile breaks across Jake’s face and he’s reaching out to grip Cougar’s cock, his thumb against the underside of the foreskin, rubbing the thin skin between his thumb and the underside of Cougar’s dick and it makes him hiss with pleasure. 

“God, that’s beautiful,” Jake murmurs and bends down to put his lips to it, tongue snaking out to trace the line where the very edge of foreskin has pulled back and the tender skin of the head of his dick is exposed. Cougar twitches with the sensation, squirms on the bed. Jake blows a stream of cool air over him and then nuzzles in, brushing the prickly hair of his goatee against the shaft.

“Tell me what you need,” Jake says, and Cougar growls. “What do you like, Cougs?”

Jake kisses the very tip of Cougar’s dick, a soft peck that would be chaste on any other part of his body. 

“Fuck,” he groans. “Anything. Jake, anything. Your mouth, your hand, Dios, don’t stop.” He tries to lift his hips, tries to press up against Jake’s lips that are so damn close, but Jake pulls back by the same distance. 

“I’ve got you,” he promises, and Cougar spreads his legs, hooks a heel around Jake’s shoulders to try to pull him in. Jake slides those beautiful lips over his dick, drawing his foreskin back with a gentle hand, flicks his tongue against the sweet sheltered parts of Cougar even as his other hand is reaching lower, his thumb rubbing at Cougar’s hole, dry but not trying to push in, just teasing the muscle.

He tries to hold back. Tries not to lose it so quick. He throws a forearm over his eyes, cutting off the wicked sight of Jake going down on him and hiding his shame as Jake’s mouth and Jake’s touch makes him come undone. Jake chokes as he swallows, the angle bad for it, pulls off and wipes his mouth, still smiling as he crashes to the bed against Cougar’s body. 

“Wow,” Jake laughs and stares up at the ceiling. “So, that was a nice surprise.” 

Their sweat cools and the room isn’t cold, but it’s not exactly warm either and Jake pulls the sheets out from under them and haphazardly covers most of their bodies. It’s another thing Cougar isn’t used to, touching after the sex is done, Jake’s fingers tracing idle patterns on his arm, his breath tickling Cougar’s hair. 

“Any idea what we’re doing, here?” Jake asks, but he sounds amused.

“None,” Cougar answers and they lounge together until Cougar starts to drift off.

He wakes sometime in the night, alone in the bed. The heater is humming and the room half-lit by the light of the computer monitors glowing off of the wall. He turns his head and Jake is there in the other bed, sprawled out on his back asleep. Cougar gets up to piss before returning to sleep but on the way back he sees the 9mm loose on top of the sheets, inches from Jake’s hand. The sight of it always chills him and there’s no way he’ll go back to sleep with it loose like that. A lifetime of responsible gun-handling makes him reach for the weapon, wary in case he wakes Jake and Jake comes up swinging. He lifts the gun, flicks on the thumb safety and stows it away on top of the nearby mini-fridge, close enough that Jake can find it, far enough to not be fired accidentally.

 

==========

“So what do you like? Sex-wise, I mean,” Jake asks and Cougar’s face heats with the embarrassment of it. It is not a question to ask over migas and refried beans in the bright light of day. He looks around but nobody seems to have heard. He tries to glare Jake into silence but the man grins it off.

“Hey, it’s not prying if I have a vested interest.” Then he really looks and sees how uncomfortable Cougar is. He sighs and relents. “Fine. Not here. But I want to know, Cougs. I want to give you what you need.”

“You do,” he says, voice low and not meeting Jake’s eyes. He’d take anything Jake has to offer and be glad of it. It seems so different than what he’s tried to get before, he’s not even sure that his previous experiences matter at all.

Jake shifts the topic to his work on the house, almost done, and a bid already out on his next purchase. “I’ll start dressing it next week, pull the furniture out of storage to make it look lived in,” and Cougar thinks what it would be like, to be here next week, and the week after and the next, to be at Jake’s side every day, all the time. He wonders if they’d be at each other’s throats with the constant exposure, or if they’d always be like this, easy, Jake’s chatter and Cougar’s silences.

On the drive back to the house, Jake rests his hand on Cougar’s thigh and Cougar flinches each time a taller vehicle passes by, imagining them seen like this.

========

“Is this okay?” Jake asks and his hand rests on Cougar’s back, thumb rubbing idly. “I just—I can’t believe I can touch you now.”

“Here,” Cougar says, “It’s okay here.”

They end up in the bedroom, fully clothed and kissing. 

“Tell me what you like,” Jake practically begs, their lips less than an inch apart. “I don’t want to fuck this up. What have you done, what do you want to do? What turns you on?” 

Cougar kisses him again, stalling, avoiding the questions he has no answers to. 

“What do you do, Jake?” he asks instead, “You suck dick? Fuck men?” The words are filthy and the images to go with them even more-so, and yet fire licks through Cougar’s blood at the thought, jealousy stirring at the thought of another man touching Jake and arousal too. “Do you let them fuck you?” he hisses.

Jake goes still, and Cougar realizes what he’s said, and to whom. Fuck. “Lo siento,” he starts to apologize. Jake’s hands on his arms let him know he doesn’t have to pull away.

“Is this you trying to shut me up, Cougs, or are you asking because you’re thinking about it?” Jake isn’t angry, and Cougar thanks a god he rarely talks to anymore for that. He sounds calm, and curious, only the slightest bit guarded.

Cougar shakes his head, unable to articulate his thoughts. How he can’t even think about being the one pushing inside; it is somehow more sin, more desviado, to be the one fucking instead of fucked. To take it is less macho, yes, but with the illusion that he’s a passive participant. That he doesn’t want it, doesn’t need it.

“You could,” Jake murmurs, “It’s been a while so we’d have to ease into it, but I have, since. It’s doable, as long as I could see you.”

Cougar shakes his head and keeps his eyes down. “No. I don’t want that.”

“I’ve got a day and a half,” Jake says and Cougar can hear the stress in his voice. “Just over twenty four hours, to make this so good for you that you come back and I don’t want to waste any time on trial and error. It’s inefficient.”

Cougar smirks at that, raises his eyes to take in Jake’s frustration. “Idiota." He slides his hand around the back of Jake’s neck and draws him into another kiss, trying to show without words that he’s coming back, that this means something to him. 

They stumble to the bedroom, feet tangled as they try to walk without letting go. The morning is spent in slow touches and gentle explorations, sweetness like Cougar has never allowed himself to have before. Jake lets Cougar touch wherever he wants, jokes about his robo-ball and Cougar watches his face as he rolls them in his hands, lavishing attention on both of them. He decides he likes Jake in his mouth, the mellow flavor of the man’s skin against his tongue. 

 

=============

 

He wakes on his last morning in Dallas with Jake in bed with him, sitting up against the wall, long legs stretched out and Cougar’s arms thrown over his knees. He licks and nips at Jake’s thigh and gets the yelp and squirm he was expecting, but Jake quiets again too quick and Cougar looks up into serious blue eyes.

“Cougar. Is this going to change things? For you back there?”

Cougar shrugs. “Who can know? I don’t see how.” He is the same person. Should be. He doesn’t have to share this with his team, his friends who are like brothers. That hurts, but having Jake is more than enough compensation.

Jake runs his fingers through Cougar’s hair, and Cougar lays there and lets himself be petted for a while. 

“I wish you could stay,” Jake whispers, wistful, and Cougar closes his eyes against the power of that dream. Dios, he can imagine what it would be like, waking up to this life every morning, to good honest work and Jake’s kisses and playing in the park with Sophie and Sugar. But giving up his rifle, the one thing in all the world that he does the best? Having no orders, no CO? That is less certain and he tries to picture walking away from the Army, gambling his entire future on his romance with Jake.

“I’m sorry,” Jake hurries to say. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said…I just want you safe where I can look out for you.”

Cougar rolls over, sits up and pulls Jake against him. “I will be as safe as any soldier can be. I will do all that I can to come back to you. I am well trained, I am smart and strong.” 

“So are they,” Jake mutters, shrugging out of Cougar’s arms, and Cougar’s stomach twists as he realizes Jake isn’t worried about the enemy, but his team, and that he has no reply to that. He wants to think it wouldn’t matter if they found out somehow. That they wouldn’t hurt him like Jake’s team had hurt Jake, but he doesn’t know, not for sure.

“I’m sorry,” Jake says again, trying to shrug it off and smile. “You’ve passed for straight up until now, there’s no reason for that to change.”

Jake kisses him, light and quick, and then walks away to the shower, hiding and Cougar doesn’t know what to do but let him. Cougar showers after, and puts on a cotton shirt and jeans instead of his dress greens and Jake drives him to the airport.

“Adios,” he says as he steps down from Jake’s truck, without a kiss, without a touch. He meets Jake’s eyes and he hopes Jake knows it doesn’t mean he cares any less, only that there are things that he cannot do.

“See ya, Cougs,” Jake says, and Cougar thinks that he does.

Clay picks him up at the Fayetteville airport, in the car he once gambled against Cougar’s transfer. “How was Dallas?” he asks and Cougar shrugs. Clay drives, and doesn’t ask again.

They spend the next three days getting briefed and prepped for a major mission, all of them looking over the maps and intel, Cougar calculating distances and angles, Pooch the roads and air approaches, Roque estimating what will make the biggest boom. 

They spend the last night in the States in the living room of their rented house, American football on the television, beer and pizza cluttering the coffee table. The house phone rings, a rare enough occurrence. Cougar does a quick calculation and comes up with late-afternoon in California, the kids his madre babysits for the day gone and dinner eaten, the perfect time for her to call and try to catch him.

He gets up and stretches and wanders down the hall, studiously ignoring the dirty look Pooch gives him as Pooch goes to get the phone. He heads to his bedroom, to the sliding glass doors and small balcony overlooking a narrow snow-dusted valley, a trickle of stream at the bottom still flowing. Pooch has given up on chasing him across the house but he likes having the nearby exit in case of sudden persistence. He can hear Pooch’s voice, indistinct, just enough to catch the tone of it, casual and then sharper. He should go take the phone. See what has happened. See if there’s something more than his paycheck that they need from him. 

“Cougar!” Roque’s bark turns him away from the window. “Phone for you, some woman. Pooch says she’s pretty upset.” When Cougar still hesitates, Roque adds, “It’s not your mom, she said something about Dallas. That’s where your girl is, right?”

“Mierda!” Cougar swears and pushes past Roque. Fuck, there’s only one woman in Dallas who knows his name and if she’s crying, it means Cougar is going to kill someone.

“Si,” he says into the phone as he snatches it from Pooch’s hands. The guys are staring at him and he turns his back, can’t face them right now.

“Carlos! Oh thank god.” And yes, it’s Teresa, her voice thick with tears. “It’s Jake. He’s in the hospital. He was attacked last night. He’s asking for you and I don’t know what…”

“Que?” The words don’t make sense. It’s like he’s forgotten English. 

“His house,” she says, slowing down, starting over. “They threw burning bottles of gasoline through his windows and when he came out they were waiting for him. They beat him.” Her voice catches in a muffled sob. “He got out of surgery a few hours ago and when he woke up he kept asking for you. Kept repeating your cell number and this number.”

“Is he…” and he doesn’t even know what he wants to ask.

“Concussion,” she says, and maybe that’s what he was asking. “Broken arm and ribs, smashed hand, smoke inhalation.”

“Who?” 

“He said he didn’t get a good look.” She doesn’t sound convinced and god-damn the man, not sharing his enemies.

He tries to imagine it, the guys who could get the drop on Jake like that. 

“His gun. Where was his gun?”

“It was there when the firefighters found him. The cops. They said he never got a shot off. Never even took off the safety.”

Cougar clenches the hand not holding the phone into a fist so hard his knuckles creak. He can imagine the whole thing in Technicolor, Jake coming out of his front door, smoke and flames behind him, glasses askew and the 9mm in his hand. Faceless men with bats and crowbars and Jake pulling the trigger and nothing happens, nothing at all because Cougar kept fucking with his weapon, kept changing it from how he expected it to be and now it matters, now Jake is hurt because of him. 

“Carlos,” her voice is softer, more under control. “He keeps asking for you. He says he needs you. He sent Sophie and I to a hotel. I think he’s scared. I think something is really wrong.”

“I’ll come,” he says and hears the guys muttering behind him. 

She thanks him, and he hears Sophie asking something in the background, her little-girl voice full of tears and he hangs up while he still has some control over himself.

“What the hell?” Roque asks, but Cougar turns and looks at Clay. 

“I need to go,” he says and Clay frowns. 

“What’s happened? Your girl okay?”

He clenches his teeth. “She’s not my girl. Her brother--my friend Jake. He’s been attacked. He’s in the hospital.”

Clay shakes his head. “I’m sorry as hell to hear that, Cougar, but we’ve got a mission tomorrow and a lot of time and money already invested. If it was a family member, I might be able to—”

“Clay!” Cougar cuts him off. Pooch is staring at him. Roque glaring. “I have to go.” His jaw works, trying to spit out the words that would make this happen. 

“He’s not only my friend,” he says at last, and then through gritted teeth: “He’s my hairdresser.” 

Pooch chokes. Roque lets out a long “What the fuuuuck?” and Clay blinks at him.

“Are you—” Clay starts but Cougar cuts him off.

“Don’t ask.” 

Clay stares at him for long seconds and Cougar is not backing down, won’t back down over this. 

“You’re serious,” Clay asks.

“Si.”

“And you care about this—Jake. Enough to risk disciplinary action.”

He’ll risk a damn court-martial for this, although he’s sane enough not to want to.

“Si.”

Clay reaches out, slow, and takes Cougar’s right hand in both of his. “You’re sure about this. That this guy is worth it.” He wraps his right hand around Cougar’s index finger, left around Cougar’s hand and Cougar has to fight himself not to flinch back, to not pull his hand away.

“Shit, Clay, no,” Pooch says, but Cougar nods, his eyes locked with Clay’s. He can’t help the shout of pain as Clay’s hands pull down and push back, as his finger breaks as clean as he could hope for, but he’s grateful, for the way out.

“Well you sure as shit can’t shoot like that,” Clay announces, “I’ll drive you to the infirmary and then you’ve got a week to recover.”

Cougar cradles his hand and nods. “I’ll need your car,” he says and Clay doesn’t argue.

===========

It takes an hour for Clay to drive him onto the base, get his finger taped and splinted, to fill out the paperwork. The story is he slipped on some ice and caught it wrong when he fell, and the embarrassment of such a stupid accident is a small price to pay to be able to go to Jake.

Roque and Pooch are still up when Cougar and Clay get back to the house. 

“Were you just not gonna tell us?” Roque asks as he walks in the door, and Cougar pushes past him without a word. “Six months, man, we’ve killed for you, we’ve bled for you and you don’t tell us shit like this?”

There’s a thump and Cougar thinks Roque just punched the wall, hears the low rumble of Clay’s voice telling him to stow it.

Cougar pulls open his closet and grabs his go-bag and the case that holds his rifle, the one he owns himself and doesn’t have to check out of a weapons locker to use. It’s not as sweet as the M40, but it’ll do in a pinch. 

He drops his dog tags on the bed, because they don’t match any of the names he’s traveling with. He leaves his wallet too and the only things to link him to Carlos Alvarez are his fingerprints and his phone, but neither can be helped.

Clay is waiting outside his bedroom door with the keys to the car.

“What are you going to do, Cougar?” he asks and Cougar shakes his head.

“Whatever Jake needs.”

Clay frowns, and glances pointedly at the rifle case. 

Cougar shrugs. His hand throbs. “The man was god-damn special forces. He’s not calling me to hold his hand.”

Clay crosses his arms. “This guy would ask you to kill for him?”

“I said what he needs, not what he asks for.”

Clay doesn’t like it still, but knowing that Cougar isn’t off to play hitman at another’s orders seems to reassure him some. Enough. He clasps Cougar’s shoulder, passes him the keys and then lets him go. “Vaya con Dios, Carlos,” he says and Cougar turns to leave.

Pooch intercepts him on the way to the door, a bottle of Tylenol in his hand and such a worried expression on his face that Cougar softens, just for a second. “I’ll be back,” he promises without knowing for sure if it’ll be possible.

Pooch nods. “Printed you a map,” he says and tucks the folded papers into the top of Cougar’s bag, and then he steps back, obviously not liking standing there while a team-mate goes off into uncertain danger.

Roque stands and glares, arms crossed over his chest. If Cougar had more time, he’d be worried about that.

Cougar backs out of the driveway and already this life feels far away, and only Jake is real.

He drives. West by south-west, just over the speed-limit. If he gets stopped, the trip will be over before it’s begun; a Mexican in a sports car with a high-powered rifle and handguns has to be careful, driving anywhere, but especially in the Deep South.

Around three, the lack of sleep starts to override the burning need to get to Jake and he pulls off to get gas, buys a coffee and digs in his bag for one of the stimulants he filched from the stock the Army has assigned to him on when it could be days before his target appeared.

Outside of Tyler, he buys a pay-as-you-go phone and calls Jake’s cell phone, to let Teresa know he’ll be in in a few hours. She gives him the last directions up to the hospital, and he thinks she sounds better, now that she knows he’s on the way.

===========

Cougar takes just a second in the hospital parking lot, reties his hair and settles his hat on his head, making sure he looks more like a worried family member than a crazy person who drove seventeen hours straight to get there. He goes into the hospital’s lobby and up to the information desk. 

“Jacob Jensen,” he says, and the receptionist types on a computer. The winter sun is shining through the five-story tall windows of the edifice, bright when Cougar expects all the world to be dark with worry.

“Mrs. Jensen is with him now, and he’s only allowed one at a time. Should I let her know you’re here, Mr…”

“Carlos,” he says, “Just tell her Carlos is here.”

He finds a seat and sits to wait, hat in his hands as he turns it slowly, feeling the worn-smooth rim between his middle-finger and thumb, the seam at the edge that marks a full rotation. He counts eighteen rotations and then Teresa is there, her dark eyes red-rimmed but dry.

“Carlos,” she says and he stands. She steps in and hugs him and he catches her weight. “Come on.” She pulls herself together after only a second. “I’ll take you up to the room. If you want to stay, I’ll go to the hotel. I just—I don’t want him to be alone.”

“I don’t know yet,” he says as they get into the elevator. “Let me talk to him.”

Teresa nods and when the elevator stops they get out. She leads him past the nurses’ station, down a maze of hallways and then knocks on a door. When there’s no answer, she opens it and nods Cougar in. “He looks like hell,” she warns him, “But he’s going to be okay. Don’t be worried if he doesn’t wake up. He kept getting upset. They had to sedate him a little while ago.”

Cougar steps in and is glad for the warning. Jake. Dios, it was four days ago that they were lying in bed together, four days ago that Jake was smiling, healthy, happy. Now there are bandages on his head, bruises everywhere that Cougar can see. One eye is swollen shut, a line of sutures running almost the full length of his eyebrow. An oxygen tube is looped under his nose, a cast on his left arm and an ice-pack on his right hand. Cougar has to stare at the readout from the heart monitor for a minute or more, to reassure himself that Jake is only sleeping.

He can smell the smoke over the disinfectant and medicinal odors of the hospital.

“Jake,” he says at last, sitting in the chair beside the bed. “I am here, mi amor. I have come.” 

He sits in the chair and he stares at Jake, watching the rise and fall of his chest, the utter stillness of his body. When he can’t take it anymore he stands and goes out again, sits down beside Teresa on a padded bench down the hall, Jake’s door still in sight. She leans her shoulder against his and he lets her, lends her his strength.

“Your husband?” he asks at last, more for something to take his mind from his worries than from any burning need to know.

She chuckles, a mirthless sound. “Technically.” 

He raises an eyebrow, to see if she’ll continue or not. 

“He was my best friend, and I had the biggest crush on his brother.” She shrugs. “I turned up pregnant the year Jake went to basic. Nick, the douche, went to Vegas. Jake said he didn’t want his niece growing up without family. He wanted to give her as much as he could, so he put a ring on my finger.”

She looks at Cougar, her tone firm so there are no misunderstandings. “It was never more than that. A way for him to take care of us, for us to take care of him. We never—we spent our wedding night sitting in a hotel room watching The Princess Bride, with me seven months pregnant, and that’s as romantic as it got.”

He expects to feel relief, and when he doesn’t, realizes it was because he never worried, not about this, not with Jake.

“What happened to your hand?” Teresa asks, and he shrugs.

“Slipped on the ice. Landed badly.” He gives his lips the little twist at the corner that makes the words a joke instead of a lie and she looks sad.

He goes back into Jake’s room a little while later. Teresa goes to her hotel room to nap. 

“Jake,” he calls again, soft, and Jake’s face twitches; the blip of his heart rate picks up and he takes a deeper breath, sighs it out past his split lip. 

“I am here,” Cougar says, wanting to reach out, to touch him, but afraid of startling him, afraid of Jake hurting himself fighting back.

Jake’s good eye blinks open and he lies so still as he reorients himself, figures out where he is.

“Cou?” he rasps, a hurtful, awful sound. 

“Si. Teresa called. I came.” He sees a plastic cup with a straw on the bedside, fills it with water from the bathroom sink and puts it to Jake’s lips. Jake sips and then closes his eye again. Cougar sits and rests his hand on Jake’s upper arm, above the cast. The blip of the heart monitor slows by a few beats per minute.

“Sexy, huh?” Jake jokes and Cougar would shake him if he didn’t look so bad.

“Don’t,” he says. “It will heal.”

Jake is quiet and Cougar thinks he may have fallen asleep again, until he says “Cougar, I need a favor.”

“Jake. Anything.”

Jake’s lips twitch into a painful-looking smile. “Got a pen?”

“I’ll get one,” he says, and expects Jake to be asleep again when he returns from the nurses’ station.

“Are we alone?” Jake rasps and Cougar realizes that between the swollen eye and not having his glasses, Jake is practically blind.

“We are,” Cougar tells him.

“There were three of them,” Jake says when Cougar sits down again. “Remember those guys? The ones in the alley that were gonna burn you?”

Cougar goes cold and hard inside. God-damn. This is his fault too, that they even targeted Jake.

“I remember them,” he says.

Jake coughs a laugh. “I may have fucked with them a little too hard. I dunno, man. They must have followed me home from the club. The night after you left. I dunno how long they’ve been looking for me, but they found me. Burned my place, kicked my ass.

“I need you to talk to them, Cougar. I couldn’t ask anybody else to do it. Nobody else could be safe and do it. Couldn’t trust the cops. A lot of shit can go down when a man’s out on bail. Just gonna get worse.” He flicks his tongue out to moisten his lips, and Cougar offers him the straw again. He sighs and lays his head down again when he’s done drinking. “I can’t risk them looking up the owner of that house and seeing that I own another one. I can’t have them find Teresa and Sophie. I need you to go and tell them it’s over. They win. I’m sorry. I’ll fix what I can and not fuck with them anymore.”

Cougar takes a deep breath, trying to calm himself. He nods, because Jake needs him to. “I will take care of this,” he promises, and it’s even the truth.

One by one, Jake whispers out the names, addresses, phone numbers, last places of employment, vehicle descriptions, tag numbers. Cougar writes it all down in his neat, tiny print. 

“Sleep now,” he tells Jake when the list is through.

“’Kay,” Jake agrees, but he fights it anyway. “Cougs. It’s okay, right? That Teresa called you?”

“Si,” Cougar tells him, although he has no idea. “Sleep.”

And Jake does.

Cougar stays. Sits at Jake’s bedside as the nurses change shift and rush hour churns up the traffic on the road he can see from Jake’s window. Teresa comes back, a few hours after she’d left, looking less tired.

“He was awake for a while,” Cougar tells her. “He should be calmer now.” 

“Carlos…” she says, her concern for him obvious. 

He shakes his head. “Jake would not ask for anything that couldn’t be done.”

She hugs him again and then he goes.

============

He picks up a city map with cash at the gas station down the street from the hospital, then gets a room in a seedy hotel in a heavily Hispanic corner of town. He switches the uppers he’s on for downers and sleeps for six hours, leaving the alarm on his phone to wake him up. 

The bars are closing and the prostitutes on the corner looking tired when he gets out of bed, washes his face and pulls out the map. He marks his objectives, two of them less than a mile apart, the last only a little further. He considers his approaches and exit possibilities, but without seeing the lay of the land it’s impossible to be certain he’s making the best choices. He checks through his available armament. Six-shot revolver, knife, garrote, rifle. 

He drives, one slow pass by each location and then parks Clay’s car far out of the way. The winter sun is breaking the horizon, pale and anemic. Cougar finds a spot on the first man’s apartment-porch to wait, behind the short wooden fence, out of sight of the neighbors. Waits until he can see the shadow of the man behind his blinds. He taps on the door, pistol held down and out of sight, awkward in his left hand. He hears the security chain slide and the doorknob turns and Cougar hits it hard with his shoulder, bowling the man back, sprawled on the floor, face bloodied. Cougar remembers him, remembers being on his knees as this man poured alcohol over him, as this man was ready to burn him.

He closes the door behind him and chases him into a corner, this man who has hurt Jake.

“Quiet!” he hisses and the fear of the gun catches the breath in the man’s throat, keeps him from shouting. 

There is a moment of crystal clarity, that of all the things Cougar has done in his life, what he’s about to do is the thing that Jake will not be able to forgive him for. Will not be able to forget.

But men like this, they don’t stop while they’re behind, always convinced that one more attack will leave them the victor. Jake may hope, but Cougar knows, no amount of reason, of surrender, of compromise is going to get through to them. 

“You will not hurt him again,” he says, and the man nods, frantic, and Cougar can see the lie in his eyes.

He steps forward, snaps his foot up and out and the man chokes around his crushed throat, curls and kicks.

Cougar leaves the man still twitching out his death-throes, turns the knob with his shirt-tail and tucks the pistol in his pocket. 

There are a few other people leaving for work, walking bleary-eyed from door to car, but none of them gives him a single glance, much less a second.

He’s waiting in the second man’s apartment when he comes home after work, and the garrote is a trick to use with one hand injured, but he makes it work, holding on tight and taking the elbows the man whips back into his ribs. 

The last guy lives in a third-storey loft in a renovated textile factory, all brick walls and wide-open spaces. Cougar just shoots him from the abandoned warehouse down the street, the rifle awkward to use with his left hand and right eye. He hits the guy once in the arm and twice in his center-mass, with a last shot to the head, a shameful mess, but it looks more amateur this way. He wonders if the CIA handlers he’s worked with would be proud or ashamed of the crime scene. He picks up his brass and is across the roof and three blocks away before he hears sirens. He slides behind the wheel of Clay’s car and drives slow and easy out of the parking lot. 

He criss-crosses the city for a while, eyes on the rear-view, but nobody’s following him. 

Jake is awake when Cougar gets back to the hospital, Teresa sitting at his bedside, laptop open, reading him real-estate listings.

“Carlos,” she says, her dark eyes looking him over as if for wounds. 

“Hey, ‘Resa,” Jake rasps, “Can you see if they have another of those apple juices?” 

She frowns but doesn’t object. “I’m going to go see if they have a cure for bullshit in the gift-shop,” she adds, “You guys take your time.”

Cougar gives her a grateful nod and sits in the seat that she abandoned, his hat in his hands. 

“It’s done,” he says when the room is clear. He’d take Jake’s hand, but his knuckles are all busted, split, swollen and black with bruises. 

“You’re okay?” Jake asks, and Cougar nods. 

“Thank God,” Jake sighs, and relaxes back against his pillows. “I didn’t want to ask you for that. I didn’t want you taking that kind of a risk, but I didn’t know what else to do…”

“Shhh,” Cougar hushes him. He finds an uninjured spot on Jake’s shoulder and rests his fingertips there. 

“I have to get back to base,” Cougar says in the quiet. “I’ll go after I leave here.”

“I’m sorry,” Jake says again and Cougar cuts him off. 

“You needed me. I came.”

“I love you,” Jake says and Cougar squeezes his shoulder, unwilling to hear these words when he doubts they would be said if Jake knew what he’d done.

“Be well,” Cougar says and he stands, slides his hat onto his head and walks to the door. He passes Teresa in the hall. 

“You can take your daughter home now,” he says, and walks away before she can reply.

It’s a long damn drive back to North Carolina, as he leaves behind everything that makes him real.

===============

He stops at a hotel in Georgia, listens as the woman at the desk warns him about loud music or smoking pot or having other people in his room. When he finally gets the keys, the place reeks of cigarettes and the air-conditioner ticks as it runs, but he locks the door and takes a pill and doesn’t wake up until checkout time.

He smashes the phone he’d used in Dallas, makes sure the little card is broken in half, and drops it in the hotel dumpster out back.

It’s dark when he gets back to the house, but the lights are still on. He fumbles his keys in the lock, hands still buzzing with the hum of the road, and too many hours behind the wheel.

Clay comes into the living room to see who it is, looks him up and down. “You okay?” he asks and Cougar nods.

“Si. Tired.”

“Thought you’d be gone longer.”

He shakes his head, not willing to explain that he didn’t want to be there when Jake found out what he’d done. “Mission get scrapped?”

Clay nods. “Not gonna run it with a comms guy on loan and a sniper we’ve never worked with before. They put another team on it.”

“Good,” Cougar says, relieved, and then he runs out of words, turns and goes down the hall to his room. Stows his bag and his rifle in the closet and gathers his dog-tags from the bed. He hesitates for a second, and then pulls them on. Waits for that feeling of right and home that they’ve always given him but it doesn’t come.

He lies down on top of his blankets and stares at the ceiling, remembering Jake’s smile and Jake’s kiss and trying to reconcile himself to never knowing these things again.

===========

Roque’s fist banging on his door wakes him in the morning. “Breakfast!” he yells and Cougar knows it’s bullshit because they have yet to have breakfast together in the morning unless there was a mission that day and Clay wanted to make sure they’d all packed on some good slow carbs.

He rolls out of bed anyway. Figures he’ll let them interrogate him now instead of later. 

The kitchen smells of pancakes and Cougar slides into the chair closest to the door. Pooch flips a couple onto a plate and they let Cougar get the syrup poured before the questions start. Pooch is the one to break the ice, being the one least likely to get punched in the nuts.

“So, your um, your Jake. He okay?”

Cougar nods and cuts his pancakes. “He will be. Busted up pretty good.”

“So how long has it been? You and this hairdresser?” Roque’s voice is accusing. Good cop, bad cop then, with Clay watching it all.

“Es complicado.” Even he doesn’t know how to measure it. From the time they first met, and Cougar stopped looking for other men to fuck him? From the kiss, from when they started talking about it? Has it been eight months or three or only two weeks?

“You serious about him?” Pooch asks and the question is a stab to the guts. Because he is, more serious than he’s been about anything in his life except for maybe the military or protecting his family with his absence.

“It doesn’t matter.” He stabs a stack of pancake chunks and stuffs them in his mouth.

“The hell does that mean?” Roque demands, and if he wasn’t so torn up, Cougar would smile to hear his voice go from belligerent to protective. “What the fuck, he calls you to come running to Dallas and he’s just fucking around?”

Cougar is on his feet before he’s thought of standing, the flats of his hands slamming down on the table, making the cutlery jump and Clay’s glass spill over. Fresh pain stabs through his broken finger, sharp and clear.

“I fucked up!” he shouts, unable to have his team think of Jake as faithless, as less than the man that Cougar knows him to be. And then he turns and leaves the kitchen, before he loses his temper and goes over the table at Roque.

They don’t corner him about it again, but he catches Clay looking introspective, Pooch outright worried and Roque constipated often enough. He knows it’s because of him, he just doesn’t know what to do about it.

He goes in to the base every day for the rest of the week. Hits the sniper range and works on shooting off-handed, just for something to do. He’s been back at Bragg for nine days when Jake leaves a message on his phone. Five words. “Jesus, Cougar,” his tone soft with awe or horror. And then firmer, “Call me, okay?”

Cougar holds the phone in his hands, but can’t bring himself to dial. Can’t bear to hear the words he expects. 

He puts it off another two weeks, and then he’s out of the splint and the team’s given another mission. South America this time, body-guarding some CIA guys as they negotiate with guerrillas for the return of a trio of rain-forest tourists turned hostages. It ends up with the Losers slipping into the camp while the CIA makes some noise, but all they find are shallow graves.

They fly back to Bragg, landing in the cool light of dawn. Cougar sits for his debriefing and he’s tired, so fucking tired. Tired of missions and killing and feeling nothing. Of hiding and pretending. He signs onto one of the unassigned computers and prints out a stack of forms. He spends every free moment thinking about them, or about Jake. He thinks about calling his madre.

The army is all he knows, and his heart isn’t in it any more. He fills the blanks in with his small, tidy print. Hand-delivers them to Clay instead of dropping them in his in-box.

Clay takes the papers, and puzzlement turns to surprise as he reads. “Cougar,” he sighs, “Are you sure about this? If you need another week, to go make up with your hairdresser, I’ll see what I can swing…”

But he’s shaking his head already. “This isn’t about Jake. The fight’s gone out of me,” he says. “I’m no use. To myself or my team.”

Clay rubs a hand over his stubble, and he looks so unhappy. “Okay,” he says at last. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll put my signature on it, but it has to be approved by the higher-ups.”

Cougar expects this. For it to be a struggle. Men like them seldom retire. He has always expected to die with his rifle in his hand.

“Gracias,” he says and Clay shoos him out of the office.

He goes back to his room and dials Jake’s number.

=========

“Cougar?” Jake’s voice is breathy, like he ran for the phone.

“Si.” He can barely say the word for the tightness in his chest.

“I need to see you,” Jake says, soft and open and hope flares because he doesn’t think Jake would make him come face-to-face just to dump him. Cougar tries to tell himself that it doesn’t mean Jake wants to keep him. It could be about the three bodies he left on the ground in Dallas, an incriminating conversation that Jake doesn’t want to have over cell phone towers. 

“I have no more leave,” Cougar says, even though Clay would probably fly him to Dallas himself if it meant a chance of Cougar not taking that early discharge. 

“I’ll fly out,” Jake offers. “It’ll be another week or two before I’m up to it, but I’ll text you when I’ll be there. I’ll get a hotel room, and you can come by whenever you’re not needed on base.” Cougar thinks on it too long and Jake adds “If that’s okay. If you want to see me.”

“I’ll come,” he promises.

They are quiet on the phone then, Cougar just listening to Jake breathe. Then Pooch is banging on his door, letting him know the game’s starting and the beers are cold and to get his ass out there before Clay eats all the chips.

“I have to go,” he says and Jake replies, “Okay. I’ll see you soon.”

==============

On Tuesday, Cougar is told to report for a psych evaluation, and he has to smirk at the idea that they think a man would have to be crazy to want to leave a job where he goes to far away lands and shoots people in the head as the entirety of his occupation. The shrink asks him questions and he answers, yes, he’s tired, no, nothing has changed recently, no he hasn’t seen or done or suffered anything outside of the usual. 

“You were injured recently?” The shrink asks, “A fall at home? Would you like to talk about that?”

Cougar looks down at his splinted hand and snorts his derision. Like such a small injury could have any bearing on his mental fitness.

“Do you have anything to add?” the man asks at the end of the session or evaluation or whatever the hell they’re calling it.

“If I could feel for the deaths I cause, I would not be able to do my job,” Cougar says. “But feeling nothing? Is no way to live.”

The man seems to take him seriously and signs him off as mentally fit to serve.

On Friday, Clay tells him there’s an interview set for noon, and to wear his dress greens. He unpacks them from the suit bag Teresa had loaned him and brushes the construction dust off of the knees, the dog hair off of his sleeve. He dresses up and goes in, stands at attention in front of Clay and his two superiors, and wonders what Clay has told them about Jake. If they know Cougar’s just a maricón playing at being macho. 

He thinks of telling them, that he’s desviado, deviant, but he thinks that he kills people for the CIA on a regular enough basis that nobody will care who he wants to suck his dick.

The questions are more specific from the brass, but he says again, how tired he is, how long he’s served, how he doesn’t feel he can protect his team to the best of his ability. The guilt burns at him, because he’s honest enough to admit that even his impaired is better than some of the army’s snipers on their best days. 

“So what exactly do you think you’re going to do out there in civilian life?” the man on Clay’s left asks, and Cougar’s lips twist into a smile for the first time since the interview started.

“I don’t know. Maybe buy a house and fix it up.”

“We’ll let you know,” one of them says eventually, “Dismissed.”

He goes, and even with the final decision still up in the air, he feels more free.

Pooch drives him back to the house and on the way he checks his phone. There’s a text from Jake: “Thursday, noon, flight 663.”

“I will pick you up,” he sends back, careful on the keys so he doesn’t look foolish.

=============

On Saturday Cougar takes his personal rifle to a civilian range for a couple hours and shoots off a hundred rounds or so. Enough wear on the rifling that he’s confident the ballistics will never match to any bullet recovered at a crime scene in Dallas.

=============

The official word comes down on Tuesday, and Clay drives Cougar in to the base to turn in his security badges, sign the final paperwork, receive his handshake and honorable discharge. He closes his eyes on the ride back, and feels disconnected from everything, all the weight gone from him. He doesn’t know where he’s going now, or who he’ll be, only that he’ll be free for the first time in his life.

Clay waits with him in the living room when Pooch and Roque get in. Faces serious enough that Pooch sits down right away and Roque reaches for the comfort of a knife. 

“I’m out,” Cougar tells them. “I did not want to say before it was official, in case they denied me.”

Roque stands and leaves without a word, kicking the coffee table sideways on his way out and Clay sighs. “Give him a day or two.” 

“Is this about your guy?” Pooch asks, trying to understand, and Cougar has to wonder why nobody thinks he could leave for himself. “I mean, I know first-hand that long-distance relationships are hard on you both, but…”

“No,” Cougar says, quiet but firm. “He understood, from the beginning. Who I was and what I could give to him. He’s only asked me to stay once, and only because he doesn’t know my team.” 

Pooch nods and thinks on it and finally reaches out his hand. “Then you take care, and good luck. However things work out with you and him, remember you have friends.”

Cougar takes his hand. "Invite me,” he says, “When you find the courage to ask Jolene to marry you,” and Pooch laughs and looks flustered at the change of topic. 

“I promise, man. An invitation for you and your Jake too.”

=============

Cougar rents a car to pick Jake up from the airport. It feels inappropriate to keep borrowing Clay’s when the man isn’t his CO anymore; he’s not allowed to drive the army’s loaner cars, and the roads are still too icy for the bike, even if he knew what shape Jake was going to be in. He gets to the arrivals door an hour early and watches the marquee as Jake’s plane gets closer and closer. Security won’t let non-travelers out to the gate, but he does wait at baggage claim, hat in his hands. 

Spotting Jake in the incoming crowd isn’t hard, the man is so damn tall. He’s lost weight since Cougar last saw him standing, muscle-mass that he’ll have to work at to put back on. He looks healthy otherwise, standing straight and strong, arm out of the cast and only held a little stiff against his side, more like he’s afraid of getting hurt than in actual pain.

He looks pensive, uncertain, and then Cougar lifts his hat to catch his attention and Jake’s face lights up with such joy and hope and love that Cougar can’t help but smile back despite his worries. Jake walks up to him and Cougar should take the small bag off of his shoulder, should turn to walk with him to the baggage claim conveyor belt, but he can’t look away, even as Jake steps into his personal space, as they stand face to face.

Cougar reaches out and Jake doesn’t pull back, not when Cougar’s hand loops behind his neck, not when Cougar’s lips crash into his. The kiss is brief, and heat flares from Cougar’s neck to his cheeks as they pull away, at the audacity of what he’s done. He pulls back and looks around but nobody seems to care.

“Wow,” Jake says, and he reaches out to touch Cougar’s arm, like he can’t believe he’s real.

“I have a car,” Cougar says, and it’s not the smoothest change of topic, but Jake nods. 

“Just need to get my bag. I didn’t want to be stuck carrying more than I was up to, on the plane.”

They stand side-by-side and watch the luggage go around, and when Jake points out his bag, Cougar plucks it off the turnstile and shoulders it, leading Jake out to the car.

“I wasn’t sure,” Jake says as he sits down, as the car doors close and Cougar slides the key into the ignition. “If you wanted me here. Not until just now. I thought I’d spend a week alone in a hotel room catching some fresh mountain air.”

Cougar hears a bark of laughter come from his own mouth. “Dios. I’d be a fool to not want you. Idiota.” His smile falters and they sit in the idling car, still in the parking spot. “I thought. After Dallas, what I did there…”

Jake’s hand whips out, fast as a snake, covers Cougar’s mouth. “No,” he says, firm and final. “That’s just—no. I shouldn’t have put you in that position, and I’m sure as hell not going to blame you for how it all went down. I’ve thought about this, Cougar. If it had been you in that hospital bed, I don’t know if I could have done any different.”

Cougar closes his eyes, letting Jake’s unexpected forgiveness wash over him. Then Jake’s lips are on his again, slow and gentle, more intimate than anybody but Jake has ever touched him. 

“I have something for you,” Cougar says as they finally part. He reaches down the front of his shirt, catches the chain of his dog-tags and pulls them over his head. Jake looks stunned, lost, so Cougar takes Jake’s hand and opens it, lying the tags carefully in his palm, pooling the chain on top of them.

“Are you…” Jake starts to ask but the words catch in his throat, hope warring with caution in his eyes.

“I’m out,” Cougar says, and Jake breaks with the relief of it, pulling Cougar back for another kiss, rough and desperate.

=========

They spend all of that first day in the hotel room, Cougar reassuring himself that Jake’s okay, that he’s healed and getting stronger, acquainting himself with Jake’s new scars. Jake spends the time showing Cougar just how good the fucking can be when he’s not intentionally choosing assholes to do it to him, how good it can feel when his lover cares as much or more about his pleasure than their own. 

They sprawl against each other, after, and Jake asks, “You coming back to Dallas with me?” all casual like he didn’t just have his dick up Cougar’s ass, like he didn’t just give him the orgasm of his life.

“Si,” Cougar nods. “If you’ll have me.”

“Now who’s being the idiot?” Jake asks, and holds him close.

They sleep tangled up in each other that night, and even with the pill he took to sleep, Jake’s awake before Cougar in the morning.

“You got anything you need to take care of here?” Jake asks, and Cougar thinks but can’t come up with anything, so they trade the rental car for a U-Haul van. Cougar can see the tension rising in Jake’s shoulders, in the way he carries himself as they get out of the van at the Losers’ house, light on the balls of his feet.

“Jake,” he says, soft, “These are my brothers.” 

Jake nods but seems no more reassured.

Nobody is home so they pack Cougar’s things, what few there are. He leaves the rifle, better to not have it even in the same city as a trail of bodies he dropped. There are only clothes, a few books. He’s not attached to any of the furniture. It takes both of them to load the motorcycle in the van, and Jake is wincing and breathless by the time they get it strapped down. When it’s done Cougar gets a pair of beers out of the fridge and sits out on the front porch with Jake, sprawling in a pair of deck chairs even though it’s too damn cold for it. The house doesn’t feel like his anymore; sitting on the couch would be awkward.

Clay’s sports car is the first to pull up, Pooch and Roque behind him in a second vehicle. Cougar stands to greet them and Jake does too, and Cougar’s smart enough to notice that Jake keeps a hold of his beer bottle, even though it’s been empty for half an hour.

“You out of here?” Clay asks, and Cougar nods. 

“Stuck around to say goodbye.”

Clay climbs the steps to the porch and offers Jake his hand. “Franklin Clay, nice to finally meet you,” he introduces and Jake switches the bottle to his left hand and takes Clay’s, eyes wary. 

“Jake Jensen,” Jake says back, and Cougar sees things connect behind Clay’s eyes. 

“Shit,” he says, something like regret in his voice. “I was interested in your file. Trying to get you for an op, hoping you’d click with the team and we could get you on permanent. That was a while ago.”

“That’s a shame, sir,” Jake says like it’s really not. Pooch and Roque are out of their car by now, crowding the stairs, curious to see the man who’s taking their sniper away.

“They say you started a brawl in the barracks. Broke one man’s collarbone and another’s jaw,” Clay adds, pushing, testing.

“They say that, do they?” 

Cougar raises a hand and rests it on the small of Jake’s back, can feel the tension thrumming through him.

“We need to go,” Cougar says and Clay steps back.

“I’ll let you boys get on the road then.” He looks Jake in the eye, “You take care of him, you hear?”

“Yes sir,” Jake says, says it like he means it.

They walk to the van.

“Keep in touch, asshole!” Roque yells after them, and Cougar thinks that really, that could have gone so much worse.

================

Jake says that Dallas weather in the spring is like Thunderdome justice, completely random and mostly sucky. Cougar doesn’t think it’s so bad though. Days like this, in the high-seventies, sweet and sunny, make up for the cold snaps, days of drizzle and sudden late-season snow, and no matter how Jake complains about the fickleness of the weather, Cougar thinks he’s been in the south long enough that he forgets the unrelenting frigidity of a northern winter.

Still, it’s beautiful out and perfect for an after-school trip to the park, Jake and Sophie and Sugar playing chase over the dead grass. Cougar sits on the picnic table and watches them play. Jake is looking better, stronger, getting his wind back. They’ve talked about going back to the MMA gym soon, even if Jake’s the one that’s more up to watching than fighting now. 

Cougar thinks everything will be better, when they get a room in the house they’re closing on next week livable, when Jake can cut back on the pills he’s using to sleep. It’s been hard on him, sleeping in Teresa’s house, with no gun and afraid of waking up fighting, even though Cougar’s the only one on the same side of the bedroom door lock as him.

Sugar yips and Sophie laughs and Jake takes a pratfall, rolling and flailing down the slight slope, coming up to his knees with dried grass in his hair. “Cougar!” he yells as Sophie climbs up on him and Sugar grabs his sleeve and shakes. “Cougar, help me!” 

Cougar shakes his head and waves him off, laughing. He takes his phone out of his jacket pocket, and can’t imagine a better day for this. He takes a deep breath and centers himself and then he dials.

She answers on the third ring, the chatter of children at play behind her. He smiles to hear her voice, a warmth that he’s so long denied himself. 

“Mamá,” he says before he can stop himself, “It’s me, Carlos.”

 

==========

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Bullying, hazing, homophobia, racism, internalized homophobia, violence, language, mentions of previous assault and sexual assault, Jeff Foxworthy paraphrase, Leverage cameo  
> Notes: Thanks to Peaceful_sands for her hand-holding, cheer-leading and beta-reading  
> Title from the Led Zeppelin song “Over the Hills and Far Away”
> 
> Feedback will be adored in any form--from squee to concrit to thinky-thinky thoughts.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Walk A While With Me (podfic)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10703631) by [cookiemom6067](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cookiemom6067/pseuds/cookiemom6067)




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